Emil Cioran: Citations en anglais (Page 8)

“The only subversive mind is the one that questions the obligation to exist; all the others, the anarchist at the top of the list, compromise with the established order.”

“Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.”

“No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.”

“This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.”

“On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I."”

“Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.”

“Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.”

“The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.”

“If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.”

“Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!”

“If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.”

“Thought is as much a lie as love or faith.”

“In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart. Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.”

“But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? 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...”

“The skeptic is the least mysterious man in the world, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world.”

“To suffer is to produce knowledge.”

“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. ––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.”

“To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!”

“"I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside." This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works on introspection.”