Emil M. Cioran Quotes

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“To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously.”

“Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.”

“Of all calumnies the worst is the one which attacks our indolence, which contests its authenticity.”

“The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous.”

“For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.”

“The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?”

“Of all that makes us suffer, nothing — so much as disappointment — gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.”

“The universal view melts things into a blur.”

“If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.”

“When we know what words are worth, the amazing thing is that we try to say anything at all, and that we manage to do so. This requires, it is true, a supernatural nerve.”

“To dream of an enterprise of demolition that would spare none of the traces of the original Big Bang.”

“Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands?”

“The flesh spreads, further and further, like a gangrene upon the surface of the globe. It cannot impose limits upon itself, it continues to be rife despite its rebuffs, it takes its defeats for conquests, it has never learned anything. It belongs above all to the realm of the Creator, and it is indeed in the flesh that He has projected His maleficent instincts.”

“…all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint.”

“Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.”

“To tell the truth, I couldn't care less about the relativity of knowledge, simply because the world does not deserve to be known.”

“If you don't want to explode with rage, leave your memory alone, abstain from burrowing there.”

“To act is to anchor in the imminent future.”

“My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.”

“We define only out of despair, we must have a formula… to give a facade to the void.”

“The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character - precisely that and nothing more.”

“Sadness makes you God's prisoner.”

“Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.”

“Get hold of yourself, be confident once more, don't forget that it is not given to just anyone to have idolized discouragement without succumbing to it.”

“A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people.”

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

“The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity…”

“Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.”

“There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.”

“I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.”

“A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime…”

“When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years.”

“I don't understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.”

“The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to form a reality to reality's detriment.”

“You have dreamed of setting the world ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light up a single one!”

“Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god.”

“By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.”

“The moment we believe we've understood everything grants us the look of a murderer.”

“Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?”

“Impossible to accede to truth by opinions, for each opinion is only a mad perspective of reality.”

“The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity… Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does this whispering voice say? Everything in us that is not human anymore.”

“However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; — unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them. The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.”

“We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.”

“To detach yourself elegantly from the world; to give contour and grace to sadness; a solitude in style; a walk that gives cadence to memories; stepping towards the intangible; with the breath in the trembling margins of things; the past reborn in the overflow of fragrances; the smell, through which we conquer time; the contour of the invisible things; the forms of the immaterial; to deepen yourself in the intangible; to touch the world airborne by smell; aerial dialogue and gliding dissolution; to bathe in your own reflecting fragmentation…”

“Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.”

“Great joys, why do they bring us sadness? Because there remains from these excesses only a feeling of irrevocable loss and desertion which reaches a high degree of negative intensity. At such moments, instead of a gain, one keenly feels loss. sadness accompanies all those events in which life expends itself. its intensity is equal to its loss. Thus death causes the greatest sadness.”

“One disgust, then another — to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind…The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive.”

“The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.”

“"Neither this world, nor the next, nor happiness are for the being abandoned to doubt." - This point in the Gita is my death sentence.”