Emil Cioran: Citations en anglais (Page 6)

“the deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life.”

“How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.”

“A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.”

“The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.”

“For a long while I have lived with the notion that I was the most normal being that ever existed. This notion gave me the taste, even the passion for being unproductive: what was the use of being prized in a world inhabited by madmen, a world mired in mania and stupidity? For whom was one to bother, and to what end? It remains to be seen if I have quite freed myself from this certitude, salvation in the absolute, ruin in the immediate.”

“Vague a l'ame — melancholy yearning for the end of the world.”

“An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.”

“We replace God as best we can; for every god is good, provided he perpetuates in eternity our desire for a crucial solitude....”

“It is unjust to call imaginary the diseases which are, on the contrary, only too real, since they proceed from our mind, the only regulator of our equilibrium and our health.”

“Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.”

“Haven't people learned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles?”

“Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes — desertion after desertion.”

“He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.”

“The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.”

“Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.”

“To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire.”

“A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse.”

“There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.”

“Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle…”