Emil M. Cioran: Trending quotes (page 20)

“Skepticism is an exercise in defascination.”

“Creation is in fact a fault, man's famous sin thereby appearing as a minor version of a much graver one. What are we guilty of, except of having followed, more or less slavishly, the Creator's example? Easy to recognize in ourselves the fatality which was His: not for nothing have we issued from the hands of a wicked and woebegone god, a god accursed.”

“To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.”

“The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.”

“Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world.”

“What place do we occupy in the "universe"? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we are evidently so insignificant? Once we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.”

“The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy.”

“Tolerance — the function of an extinguished ardor — tolerance cannot seduce the young.”

“God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.”

“When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.”

“Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?”

“Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.”

“Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.”

“The wrinkles of a nation are as visible as those of an individual.”

“One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.”

“To have grazed every form of failure, including success.”

“Only the idiot is equipped to breathe.”

“Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.”

“It has been a long time since philosophers have read men's souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.”