Emil M. Cioran: Everything

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

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so…”

“Compared to the refined culture of sclerotic forms and frames, which mask everything, the lyrical mode is utterly barbarian in its expression. Its value resides precisely in its savage quality: it is only blood, sincerity, and fire.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“History proves nothing because it contains everything.”

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should avoid simulacra and even "realities"; you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a "solitary elephant.”

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“It is difficult, it is impossible to believe that the Good Lord—“Our Father”—had a hand in the scandal of creation. Everything suggests that He took no part in it, that it proceeds from a god without scruples, a feculent god. Goodness does not create, lacking imagination; it takes imagination to put together a world, however botched. At the very least, there must be a mixture of good and evil in order to produce an action or a work.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

The New Gods (1969)

“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.”

A Short History of Decay (1949)

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

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral…”

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“What place do we occupy in the "universe"? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we are evidently so insignificant? Once we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement.”

The New Gods (1969)

“For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious.”

“Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.”

The Temptation to Exist (1956)

“The initial revelation of any monastery: everything is nothing. Thus begin all mysticisms. It is less than one step from nothing to God, for God is the positive expression of nothingness.”

The New Gods (1969)

“Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.”

Tears and Saints (1937)