Emil M. Cioran: Trending quotes (page 19)

“His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.”

“Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.”

“"What is truth?" is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to "How to endure life?" And even this one pales beside the next: "How to endure oneself?" - That is the crucial question in which no one is in a position to give us an answer.”

“Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what's the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?”

“Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.”

“What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?”

“I think of so many people who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death.”

“As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.”

“For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.”

“It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.”

“As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.”

“You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness.”

“Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream.”

“Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral…”

“I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass — which is better than trying to fill them.”

“Glory — once achieved, what is it worth?”

“Nothing deserves to be undone, doubtless because nothing deserved to be done.”

“That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.”

“We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface…”