Emil Cioran: Citations en anglais (Page 10)

“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.”

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

“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?”

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

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

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

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

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

“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 more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character - precisely that and nothing more.”

“Sadness makes you God's prisoner.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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