Emil Cioran: Citations en anglais (Page 7)

“Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.”

“To Live signifies to believe and hope — to lie and to lie to oneself.”

“The worst is not ennui nor despair but their encounter, their collision. To be crushed between the two!”

“Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.”

“One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland — and no other.”

“We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.”

“When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment.”

“Even in childhood I watched the hours flow, independent of any reference, any action, any event, the disjunction of time from what was not itself, its autonomous existence, its special status, its empire, its tyranny. I remember quite clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts. Time was coming unstuck from being — at my expense.”

“There is no false sensation.”

“To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze.”

“To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.”

“To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion.”

“I don't understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn't it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?”

“To think that so many have succeeded in dying!”

“If there was a God of sorrow, he would grow black heavy wings, to soar not for the skies, but for inferno.”

“Facing a landscape annihilated by the light, to remain serene supposes a temper I do not have. The sun is my purveyor of black thoughts; and summer the season when I have always reconsidered my relations with this world and with myself, to the greatest prejudice of both.”

“If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!”

“Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.”

“The Creation was the first act of sabotage.”