Emil Cioran: Citations en anglais (Page 11)

“I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.”

“A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime…”

“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.”

“I don't understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.”

“The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to form a reality to reality's detriment.”

“You have dreamed of setting the world ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light up a single one!”

“Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god.”

“By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.”

“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?”

“Impossible to accede to truth by opinions, for each opinion is only a mad perspective of reality.”

“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.”

“However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; — unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them. The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.”

“We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.”

“To detach yourself elegantly from the world; to give contour and grace to sadness; a solitude in style; a walk that gives cadence to memories; stepping towards the intangible; with the breath in the trembling margins of things; the past reborn in the overflow of fragrances; the smell, through which we conquer time; the contour of the invisible things; the forms of the immaterial; to deepen yourself in the intangible; to touch the world airborne by smell; aerial dialogue and gliding dissolution; to bathe in your own reflecting fragmentation…”

“Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.”

“Great joys, why do they bring us sadness? Because there remains from these excesses only a feeling of irrevocable loss and desertion which reaches a high degree of negative intensity. At such moments, instead of a gain, one keenly feels loss. sadness accompanies all those events in which life expends itself. its intensity is equal to its loss. Thus death causes the greatest sadness.”

“One disgust, then another — to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind…The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive.”

“The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.”