Emil M. Cioran Quotes

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“Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.”

“To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.”

“Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.”

“Revenge is not always sweet: once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.”

“By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.”

“Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.”

“Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.”

“The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.”

“Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection.”

“There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.”

“I long to be free — desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.”

“Between the demand to be clear, and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect.”

“We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.”

“We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.”

“Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.”

“Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.”

“We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job…”

“This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique — and insignificant.”

“The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion, when the intuition of disaster is so painful that it almost provokes a greater madness […] One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.”

“No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.”

“We must learn how to explode! Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage.”

“Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.”

“I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.”

“We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.”

“To accomplish nothing and die of the strain”

“To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!”

“Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.”

“I have always struggled, with the sole intention of ceasing to struggle. Result: zero.”

“A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society”

“As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.”

“the deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life.”

“How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.”

“The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.”

“For a long while I have lived with the notion that I was the most normal being that ever existed. This notion gave me the taste, even the passion for being unproductive: what was the use of being prized in a world inhabited by madmen, a world mired in mania and stupidity? For whom was one to bother, and to what end? It remains to be seen if I have quite freed myself from this certitude, salvation in the absolute, ruin in the immediate.”

“Vague a l'ame — melancholy yearning for the end of the world.”

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

“We replace God as best we can; for every god is good, provided he perpetuates in eternity our desire for a crucial solitude....”

“It is unjust to call imaginary the diseases which are, on the contrary, only too real, since they proceed from our mind, the only regulator of our equilibrium and our health.”

“Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.”

“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?”

“Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes — desertion after desertion.”

“He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.”

“The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.”

“Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.”

“To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire.”

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

“There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.”

“Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle…”

“Without will, no conflict: no tragedy among the abulic. Yet the failure of will can be experienced more painfully than a tragic destiny.”