Emil M. Cioran: Trending quotes (page 17)

“Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.”

“The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them.”

“Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion.”

“Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what — it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?”

“Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith — of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever. The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth. We are unfair to a Nero, a Tiberius: it was not they who invented the concept heretic: they were only degenerate dreamers who happened to be entertained by massacres. The real criminals are men who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic.”

“Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.”

“Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.”

“Knowledge is the plague of life, and consciousness, an open wound in its heart.”

“The advantage of meditating upon life and death is being able to say anything at all about them.”

“Try to be free: you will die of hunger.”

“Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun.”

“Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.”

“The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It's not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.”

“Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.”

“At different degrees, everything is pathology, except for indifference.”

“Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.”

“All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.”

“What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?”

“There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books.”