Emil M. Cioran Quotes

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“The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them.”

“Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion.”

“Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what — it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?”

“Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith — of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever. The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth. We are unfair to a Nero, a Tiberius: it was not they who invented the concept heretic: they were only degenerate dreamers who happened to be entertained by massacres. The real criminals are men who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic.”

“Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.”

“Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.”

“Knowledge is the plague of life, and consciousness, an open wound in its heart.”

“The advantage of meditating upon life and death is being able to say anything at all about them.”

“Try to be free: you will die of hunger.”

“Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun.”

“Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.”

“The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It's not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.”

“Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.”

“At different degrees, everything is pathology, except for indifference.”

“Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.”

“All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.”

“What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?”

“There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books.”

“All philosophers should end their days at Pythia's feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.”

“Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.”

“Out of the shadow of the abstract man, who thinks for the pleasure of thinking, emerges the organic man, who thinks because of a vital imbalance, and who is beyond science and art.”

“As soon as one returns to Doubt (if it could be said that one has ever left it), undertaking anything at all seems not so much useless as extravagant. Doubt works deep within you like a disease, or even more effectively, like a faith.”

“To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing”

“One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death's prisoner.”

“Why don't I kill myself? If I knew exactly what keeps me from doing so, I should have no more questions to ask myself since I should have answered them all.”

“Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don't know, and we don't really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.”

“What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you — what a revelation.”

“Endless brooding over a question undermines you as much as a dull pain.”

“Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.”

“In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.”

“Irons and the unbreathable air of this world strip us of everything, except the freedom to kill ourselves; and this freedom grants us a strength and pride to triumph over the loads which overwhelm us.”

“The state of health is a state of nonsensation, even of nonreality. As soon as we cease to suffer, we cease to exist.”

“To fear is to die every minute.”

“Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again.”

“Pursued by our origins…we all are.”

“Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself.”

“I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.”

“Born in a prison, with burdens on our shoulders and our thoughts, we could not reach the end of a single day if the possibilities of ending it all did not incite us to begin the next day all over again.”

“Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation.”

“His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.”

“Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.”

“"What is truth?" is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to "How to endure life?" And even this one pales beside the next: "How to endure oneself?" - That is the crucial question in which no one is in a position to give us an answer.”

“Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what's the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?”

“Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.”

“What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?”

“I think of so many people who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death.”

“As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.”

“For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.”

“It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.”