Emil M. Cioran Quotes page 4

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

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

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

The Book of Delusions (1936)

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

A Short History of Decay (1949)

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

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

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

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“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?”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

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

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“The universal view melts things into a blur.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

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

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“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.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

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

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“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?”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“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 Gall Is Divided (1952)

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

The New Gods (1969)

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

Tears and Saints (1937)

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

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

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

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

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

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“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 Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“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.”

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“Sadness makes you God's prisoner.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

Tears and Saints (1937)

“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.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

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

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

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

Tears and Saints (1937)

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

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

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

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“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.”

The New Gods (1969)

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

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“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.”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

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

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“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.”

The Book of Delusions (1936)

“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!”

The Temptation to Exist (1956)

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

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

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

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

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

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

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

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

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

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“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.”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“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.”

The Book of Delusions (1936)

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

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“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…”

A Short History of Decay (1949)

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

The Book of Delusions (1936)

“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.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“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.”

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“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.”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

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

On the Heights of Despair (1934)