Emil M. Cioran: Trending quotes (page 13)

“I am displeased with everything. If they made me God, I would immediately resign.”

“One of the biggest paradoxes of our world: memories vanish when we want to remember, but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget.”

“Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.”

“That fear which gives birth to thoughts, and the fear of thoughts…”

“All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.”

“I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.”

“Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.”

“Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.”

“The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to form a reality to reality's detriment.”

“Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.”

“Heroes abound at the dawn of civilizations, during pre-Homeric and Gothic epochs, when people, not having yet experienced spiritual torture, satisfy their thirst for renunciation through a derivative: heroism.”

“To make more plans than an explorer or a crook, yet to be infected at the will's very root.”

“History proves nothing because it contains everything.”

“If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.”

“The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.”

“The flesh spreads, further and further, like a gangrene upon the surface of the globe. It cannot impose limits upon itself, it continues to be rife despite its rebuffs, it takes its defeats for conquests, it has never learned anything. It belongs above all to the realm of the Creator, and it is indeed in the flesh that He has projected His maleficent instincts.”

“Psychoanalysis will be entirely discredited one of these days, no doubt about it. Which will not keep it from destroying our last vestiges of naivete. After psychoanalysis, we can never again be innocent.”

“They ask you for facts, proofs, works, and all you can show them are transformed tears.”

“The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life.”