Emil Cioran: Citations en anglais

Emil Cioran était philosophe et écrivain roumain, d'expression roumaine initialement, puis française. Citations en anglais.

Emil Cioran: 601 citations3 J'aime

“A minimum of unconsciousness is necessary if one wants to stay inside history. To act is one thing; to know one is acting is another. When lucidity invests the action, insinuates itself into it, action is undone, and with it, prejudice, whose function consists, precisely, in subordinating, in enslaving consciousness to action. The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depths. No man concerned with his equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.”

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The Temptation to Exist (1956)

“Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.”

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Emil M. Cioran livre A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.”

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Emil M. Cioran livre De l'inconvénient d'être né

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“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.”

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On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“There exists, I grant you, a clinical depression, upon which certain remedies occasionally have effect; but there exists another kind, a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself.”

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Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“Life is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it.”

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Tears and Saints (1937)

“The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world.”

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All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“History proves nothing because it contains everything.”

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Emil M. Cioran livre A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.”

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Emil M. Cioran livre A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.”

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Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to empty abstraction.”

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On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.”

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The Temptation to Exist (1956)

“Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.”

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Emil M. Cioran livre A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“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.”

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Emil M. Cioran livre De l'inconvénient d'être né

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“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.”

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The New Gods (1969)

“From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.”

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Tears and Saints (1937)

“This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears.”

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Emil M. Cioran livre A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“Existing is plagiarism.”

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Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“The reaction against your own thought in itself lends life to thought. How this reaction is born is hard to describe, because it identifies with the very rare intellectual tragedies.”

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The tension, the degree and level of intensity of a thought proceeds from its internal antinomies, which in turn are derived from the unsolvable contradictions of a soul. Thought cannot solve the contradictions of the soul. As far as linear thinking is concerned, thoughts mirror themselves in other thoughts, instead of mirroring a destiny.
The Book of Delusions (1936)

“We say: he has no talent, only tone. But tone is precisely what cannot be invented — we're born with it. Tone is an inherited grace, the privilege some of us have of making our organic pulsations felt — tone is more than talent, it is its essence.”

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Emil M. Cioran livre De l'inconvénient d'être né

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)