Emil Cioran: Citations en anglais (Page 12)

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

“Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.”

“We are all secularised anarchists today.”

“What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!”

“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.”

“Psychoanalysis will be entirely discredited one of these days, no doubt about it. Which will not keep it from destroying our last vestiges of naivete. After psychoanalysis, we can never again be innocent.”

“Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth...”

“Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.”

“One of the biggest paradoxes of our world: memories vanish when we want to remember, but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget.”

“He detested objective truths, the burden of argument, sustained reasoning. He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one. Others are a dialectician's invention.”

“Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.”

“Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.”

“It is not by genius, it is by suffering, and suffering alone, that one ceases to be a marionette.”

“I dream of wanting — and all I want seems to me worthless.”

“Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.”

“At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.”

“They ask you for facts, proofs, works, and all you can show them are transformed tears.”

“When you love someone, you hope — the more closely to be attached — that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.”