Emil M. Cioran Quotes page 10

“It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: in truth, it is itself the quintessence of injustice.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know where that elsewhere is.”

History and Utopia (1960)

“If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“What is marvelous is that each day brings us a new reason to disappear.”

History and Utopia (1960)

“There are no arguments. Can anyone who has reached the limit bother with arguments, causes, effects, moral considerations, and so forth? Of course not. For such a person there are only unmotivated motives for living. On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos. When all the current reasons — moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on — no longer guide one's life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.”

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“The terrifying experience and obsession of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of yourself. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness.”

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.”

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

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

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“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.”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

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

A Short History of Decay (1949)

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

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“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.”

The New Gods (1969)

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

A Short History of Decay (1949)

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

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“Two enemies — the same man divided.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

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

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“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.”

The New Gods (1969)

“Hope is the normal form of delirium.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“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.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“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.”

The Book of Delusions (1936)

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

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

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

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“"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?"”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“Nothing is indefensible — from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime.”

History and Utopia (1960)

“Consciousness is nature's nightmare.”

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.”

Tears and Saints (1937)

“What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?”

Tears and Saints (1937)

“Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.”

History and Utopia (1960)

“I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“We always love... despite; and that "despite" covers an infinity.”

History and Utopia (1960)

“What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“To be is to be cornered.”

The Book of Delusions (1936)

“To withstand any truth…”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

The Book of Delusions (1936)

“Eternity is absence.”

“You really should come to the house — one of these days we might die without having seen each other again.”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that we alone pursue the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear.”

"Since we have to die in any case, what's the use of seeing each other again?"
Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“Love of the absolute engenders a predilection for self-destruction. Hence the passion for monasteries and brothels. Cells and women, in both cases. Weariness with life fares well in the shadow of whores and saintly women.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“The first thinker was, without a doubt, the first man obsessed by why. An unaccustomed mania, not at all contagious: rare indeed are those who suffer from it, who are a prey to questioning, and who can accept no given because they were born in consternation.”

Tears and Saints (1937)