Emil M. Cioran: Trending quotes (page 14)

“When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years.”

“Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?”

“Impossible to accede to truth by opinions, for each opinion is only a mad perspective of reality.”

“I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end.”

“If I were to go blind, what would bother me the most would be no longer to be able to stare idiotically at the passing clouds.”

“What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.”

“When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment.”

“Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!”

“To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!”

“To dream of an enterprise of demolition that would spare none of the traces of the original Big Bang.”

“In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.”

“Existing is plagiarism.”

“What is not heartrending is superfluous, at least in music.”

“We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false.”

“What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.”

“Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.”

“I want to proclaim a truth that would forever exile me from among the living. I know only the conditions but not the words that would allow me to formulate it.”

“It is difficult, it is impossible to believe that the Good Lord—“Our Father”—had a hand in the scandal of creation. Everything suggests that He took no part in it, that it proceeds from a god without scruples, a feculent god. Goodness does not create, lacking imagination; it takes imagination to put together a world, however botched. At the very least, there must be a mixture of good and evil in order to produce an action or a work.”

“In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left…with a foolish grin.”