Emil M. Cioran Quotes page 3

“To Live signifies to believe and hope — to lie and to lie to oneself.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“The worst is not ennui nor despair but their encounter, their collision. To be crushed between the two!”

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

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

A Short History of Decay (1949)

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

Variant translation: We inhabit a language rather than a country.
Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment.”

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“Even in childhood I watched the hours flow, independent of any reference, any action, any event, the disjunction of time from what was not itself, its autonomous existence, its special status, its empire, its tyranny. I remember quite clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts. Time was coming unstuck from being — at my expense.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“There is no false sensation.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

Tears and Saints (1937)

“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.”

History and Utopia (1960)

“I don't understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn't it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

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

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“If there was a God of sorrow, he would grow black heavy wings, to soar not for the skies, but for inferno.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“Facing a landscape annihilated by the light, to remain serene supposes a temper I do not have. The sun is my purveyor of black thoughts; and summer the season when I have always reconsidered my relations with this world and with myself, to the greatest prejudice of both.”

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

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

The New Gods (1969)

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

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“The Creation was the first act of sabotage.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“"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?"”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“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.”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

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

The New Gods (1969)

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

History and Utopia (1960)

“This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I."”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

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

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“Thought is as much a lie as love or faith.”

Tears and Saints (1937)

“In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart. Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.”

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? 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...”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

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

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“To suffer is to produce knowledge.”

The New Gods (1969)

“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.”

The New Gods (1969)

“To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!”

The Book of Delusions (1936)

“"I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside." This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works on introspection.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left…with a foolish grin.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.”

The Temptation to Exist (1956)

“No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“All morning, I did nothing but repeat: "Man is an abyss, man is an abyss." - I could not, alas, find anything better.”

History and Utopia (1960)

“To make more plans than an explorer or a crook, yet to be infected at the will's very root.”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“Reality is a creation of our excesses.”

The New Gods (1969)

“Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.”

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself — there is no wish I make more often.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.”

History and Utopia (1960)

“As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.”

The New Gods (1969)