Emil Cioran: Citations en anglais (Page 14)

“What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.”

“What is not heartrending is superfluous, at least in music.”

“Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.”

“All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.”

“We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good — have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us. What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: "If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world. …" And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.”

“If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.”

“I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.”

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

“The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life.”

“Heroes abound at the dawn of civilizations, during pre-Homeric and Gothic epochs, when people, not having yet experienced spiritual torture, satisfy their thirst for renunciation through a derivative: heroism.”

“We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false.”

“Life inspires more dread than death — it is life which is the great unknown.”

“Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.”

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

“What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.”

“I want to proclaim a truth that would forever exile me from among the living. I know only the conditions but not the words that would allow me to formulate it.”

“Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.”

“What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!”

“Awareness of time: assault on time...”