Emil M. Cioran: Everything

“When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.”

“Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.”

“In order to conceive, and to steep ourselves in, unreality, we must have it constantly present to our minds. The day we feel it, see it, everything becomes unreal, except that unreality which alone makes existence tolerable.”

“The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it. Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?”

“We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.”

“This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique — and insignificant.”

“To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!”

“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?”

“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?”

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

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

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.”

“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.”

“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.”