Emile M. Cioran Quotes
If a man has not, by the time he is thirty, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism—I don't know whether he is to be admired or scorned, regarded as a saint or a corpse.
To Foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by the hatred smothered within.
As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.
Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death!
An individual dies ... when, instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being, he cowers within, and takes refuge there.
Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?
One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.
Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught.
I have always struggled, with the sole intention of ceasing to struggle. Result: zero.
Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.
Once you see that everything is unreal, you can't see why you should bother to prove it.
Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.
In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.
The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.
A book has to dig through the wounds, more, it has cause a new one, a book it has to be dangerous.
We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
I do not want to see BP nickel and diming these businesses that are having a tough time.
If you lack the power to demoralize yourself along with the age, to go as low and as far, do not complain of being misunderstood by it.
"The Holy Ghost," Luther instructs us, "is not a skeptic." Not everyone can be, and that is really too bad.
What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.
What a pity that 'nothingness' has been devalued by an abuse of it made by philosophers unworthy of it!
Maniacs of Procreation, bipeds with devalued faces, we have lost all appeal for each other.
I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.
The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity… Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does this whispering voice say? Everything in us that is not human anymore.
Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.
Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.
We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job.
As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.
If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.
All great ideas should be followed by an exclamation mark - a warning signal similar to the skull and crossbones drawn on high-voltage transformers.
An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.
That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.
The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.