Emil M. Cioran Quotes

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“Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.”

“We are all secularised anarchists today.”

“What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!”

“I am displeased with everything. If they made me God, I would immediately resign.”

“I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which has spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations.”

“Psychoanalysis will be entirely discredited one of these days, no doubt about it. Which will not keep it from destroying our last vestiges of naivete. After psychoanalysis, we can never again be innocent.”

“Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth...”

“Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.”

“One of the biggest paradoxes of our world: memories vanish when we want to remember, but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget.”

“He detested objective truths, the burden of argument, sustained reasoning. He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one. Others are a dialectician's invention.”

“Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.”

“Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.”

“It is not by genius, it is by suffering, and suffering alone, that one ceases to be a marionette.”

“I dream of wanting — and all I want seems to me worthless.”

“Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.”

“At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.”

“They ask you for facts, proofs, works, and all you can show them are transformed tears.”

“When you love someone, you hope — the more closely to be attached — that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.”

“Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.”

“If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?”

“Though we may prefer ourselves to the universe, we nonetheless loathe ourselves much more than we suspect. If the wise man is so rare a phenomenon, it is because he seems unshaken by the aversion which, like all beings, he must feel for himself.”

“Everyone must destroy their life. According to the way they do it, they're either triumphants or failures.”

“When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment's thought to the "meaning" of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.”

“We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.”

“I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action — mother of all vices — I am the cause of no one's suffering.”

“I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end.”

“Anxiety — or the fanaticism of the worst.”

“That fear which gives birth to thoughts, and the fear of thoughts…”

“What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name — and moving on.”

“Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.”

“The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.”

“Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!”

“This world was created from God's fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator. Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we live dramas for the boredom of a spectator, whose claps have never reached the ears of a mortal.”

“We regret not having the courage to make such and such decision; we regret much more having made one — any one. Better no action than the consequences of an action.”

“Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!”

“Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.”

“If I were to go blind, what would bother me the most would be no longer to be able to stare idiotically at the passing clouds.”

“No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.”

“To be or not to be…Neither one nor the other.”

“What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.”

“What is not heartrending is superfluous, at least in music.”

“Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.”

“All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.”

“We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good — have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us. What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: "If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world. …" And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.”

“If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.”

“I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.”

“We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.”

“The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life.”

“Heroes abound at the dawn of civilizations, during pre-Homeric and Gothic epochs, when people, not having yet experienced spiritual torture, satisfy their thirst for renunciation through a derivative: heroism.”