Emil Cioran: Citations en anglais (Page 2)

“We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.”

“One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.”

“What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.”

“Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.”

“There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.”

“Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!”

“Self-knowledge — the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?”

“Only those are happy who never think or, rather, who only think about life's bare necessities, and to think about such things means not to think at all. True thinking resembles a demon who muddies the spring of life or a sickness which corrupts its roots. To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life, to leave behind you, as symbols of your life's drama, a trail of smoke and blood — all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you.”

“Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.”

“Society: an inferno of saviors!”

“When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.”

“One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.”

“A man does not kill himself, as is commonly supposed, in a fit of madness but rather in a fit of unendurable lucidity, in a paroxysm which may, if so desired, be identified with madness; for an excessive perspicacity, carried to the limit and of which one longs to be rid at all costs, exceeds the context of reason.”

“In order to conceive, and to steep ourselves in, unreality, we must have it constantly present to our minds. The day we feel it, see it, everything becomes unreal, except that unreality which alone makes existence tolerable.”

“After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?”

“Philosophy offers an antidote to melancholy. And many still believe in the depth of philosophy!”

“Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man.”

“What are you waiting for in order to give up?”

“How can you know if you are in the truth? The criterion is simple enough: if others make a vacuum around you, there is not a doubt in the world that you are closer to the essential than they are.”