Emil Cioran: Citations en anglais (Page 24)

“If I were asked to summarize as briefly as possible my vision of things, to reduce it to its most succinct expression, I should replace words with an exclamation point, a definitive!”

“To read is to let someone else work for you — the most delicate form of exploitation.”

“Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.”

“The mind advances only when it has the patience to go in circles, in other words, to deepen.”

“In order to deceive melancholy, you must keep moving. Once you stop, it wakens, if in fact it has ever dozed off.”

“No longer ask me for my program: isn't breathing one?”

“Nothing surpasses the pleasures of idleness: even if the end of the world were to come, I would not leave my bed at an ungodly hour.”

“Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.”

“The initial revelation of any monastery: everything is nothing. Thus begin all mysticisms. It is less than one step from nothing to God, for God is the positive expression of nothingness.”

“There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.”

“For a long time — always, in fact — I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn't able to deal with it; for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.”

“It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: in truth, it is itself the quintessence of injustice.”

“The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know where that elsewhere is.”

“If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.”

“What is marvelous is that each day brings us a new reason to disappear.”

“There are no arguments. Can anyone who has reached the limit bother with arguments, causes, effects, moral considerations, and so forth? Of course not. For such a person there are only unmotivated motives for living. On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos. When all the current reasons — moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on — no longer guide one's life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.”

“Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.”

“We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.”

“The terrifying experience and obsession of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of yourself. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness.”