Emil M. Cioran: Trending quotes (page 4)

“The skeptic is the least mysterious man in the world, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world.”

“There are questions which, once approached, either isolate you or kill you outright.”

“The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.”

“The reaction against your own thought in itself lends life to thought. How this reaction is born is hard to describe, because it identifies with the very rare intellectual tragedies. ––The tension, the degree and level of intensity of a thought proceeds from its internal antinomies, which in turn are derived from the unsolvable contradictions of a soul. Thought cannot solve the contradictions of the soul. As far as linear thinking is concerned, thoughts mirror themselves in other thoughts, instead of mirroring a destiny.”

“No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.”

“The Creation was the first act of sabotage.”

“One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland — and no other.”

“We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.”

“Haven't people learned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles?”

“An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.”

“Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.”

“The only subversive mind is the one that questions the obligation to exist; all the others, the anarchist at the top of the list, compromise with the established order.”

“"You really should come to the house - one of these days we might die without having seen each other again." - "Since we have to die in any case, what's the use of seeing each other again?"”

“Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.”

“If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!”

“To think that so many have succeeded in dying!”

“To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion.”

“To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.”

“A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse.”