Emil M. Cioran: Trending quotes (page 25)

“One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.”

“No one has the audacity to exclaim: “I don’t want to do anything!” —we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions.”

“Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.”

“Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.”

“The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue.”

“If someone incessantly drops the word "life," you know he's a sick man.”

“Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.”

“Two enemies — the same man divided.”

“What anxiety when one is not sure of one's doubts or wonders: are these actually doubts?”

“An anxious man constructs his terrors, then installs himself within them: a stay-at-home in a yawning chasm.”

“I am for the most part so convinced that everything is lacking in basis, consequence, justification, that if someone dared to contradict me, even the man I most admire, he would seem to me a charlatan or a fool.”

“Hope is the normal form of delirium.”

“Thanks to depression — that alpinism of the indolent — we scale every summit and daydream over every precipice from our bed.”

“Only thoughts that are randomly born die. The other thoughts we carry with us without knowing them. They have abandoned themselves to forgetfulness so that they can be with us all the time.”

“Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.”

“I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the Gods have been against me.”

“In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.”

“"Where do you get those superior airs of yours?" "I've managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?"”

“Where are my sensations? They have melted into… me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?”