Emile M. Cioran Quotations | Page 3

Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent -unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it -we perpetuate it within ourselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude.

All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.

No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity;––for thoughts, there is always time; life has its time; there is no thought that comes too late; any desire can become a regret.

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.

If you're unlucky enough not to have alcoholic parents, it takes you a whole lifetime of intoxication to overcome the dead weight of their virtues.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing; but instead of nonchalantly promenading our own corruption, we exude our sweat and grow winded upon the fetid air.

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.

To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.

There was a time when time did not yet exist.

I do not want to see BP nickel and diming these businesses that are having a tough time.

In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.

Tyrants are always assassinated too late. That is their great excuse.

History proves nothing because it contains everything.

What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?

At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.

Just as ecstasy purifies you of the particular and the contingent, leaving nothing except light and darkness, so insomnia kills off the multiplicity and diversity of the world, leaving you prey to your private obsessions.

What strangely enchanted tunes gush forth during those sleepless nights!

The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. Why call him a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot.

Once you see that everything is unreal, you can't see why you should bother to prove it.

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.

The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion...one would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.

It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say “we" with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke "others" and regard himself as their interpreter - for me to consider him my enemy.

Between the demand to be clear,and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect.

Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?

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.

We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone 'happy', no greater flattery than to grant him a 'vein of melancholy'... This is because gaiety is link to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.

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

When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.

The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.

Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.

Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.

True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose dying: Everything!

Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.

I have always struggled, with the sole intention of ceasing to struggle. Result: zero.

We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

Nothing sweeter than to drag oneself along behind events; and nothing more reasonable. But without a strong dose of madness, no initiative, no enterprise, no gesture. Reason: the rust of our vitality. It is the madman in us who forces us to adventure; once he abandons us, we are lost; everything depends on him, even our vegetative life; it is he who invites us, who obliges us to breathe, and it is also he who forces our blood to venture through our veins. Once he withdraws, we are alone indeed! We cannot be normal and alive at the same time.

We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.

To have committed every crime but that of being a father.

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.

Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.

Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught.

Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death!

Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

A book has to dig through the wounds, more, it has cause a new one, a book it has to be dangerous.

Everything is pathology, except for indifference.

Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.

"The Holy Ghost," Luther instructs us, "is not a skeptic." Not everyone can be, and that is really too bad.

True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.

Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist-a demonic, elemental, bestial pessimist-only when life has been defeated many times in its fight against depression.

If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame.

What a pity that 'nothingness' has been devalued by an abuse of it made by philosophers unworthy of it!

Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?

One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.

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

By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.

My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission.

A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.

Man started out on the wrong foot. The misadventure in paradise was the first consequence. The rest had to follow.

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.

There is not much difference between a mortal man and a dying man. The absurdity of making plans is only slightly more obvious in the second case.

The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.

What necessity impels a writer who has produced fifty books to write still one more? Why this proliferation, this fear of being forgotten, this debased coquetry?

Every form of talent involves a certain shameless-ness.

The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty-the sideshow of second thoughts-is his rule; he offers himself.

My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

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

Boredom dismantles the mind, renders it superficial, out at the seams, saps it from within and dislocates it.

I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.

Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy.

Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.

Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise.

To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell

We are all geniuses when we dream.

Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other.

A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.

To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer. As soon as they consent to live, the unbeliever and the man of faith are fundamentally the same, since both have made the only decision that defines a being.

Every profound dissatisfaction is of a religious nature: our failures derive from our incapacity to conceive of paradise and to aspire to it, as our discomforts from the fragility of our relations with the absolute.

No human beings are more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief

Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.

There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.

Consider love: is there a nobler outpouring, a rapture less suspect? Its shudders rival music, compete with the tears of solitude and of ecstasy: sublime...but a sublimity inseperable from the urinary tract: transports bordering upon excretion, a heaven of the glands, sudden sancitity of the orifices. It takes no more than a moment of attention for this intoxication, shaken, to cast you back into the ordures of physiology or a moment of fatigue to recognize that so much ardor produces only a variety of mucous.

If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.

What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.

If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.

To hope is to contradict the future.

Pursued by our origins…we all are.

Every thought should recall the ruin of a smile.

The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?

Humanity adores only those who cause it to perish.

Try to be free: you will die of hunger.

All philosophers should end their days at Pythia’s feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.

Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?

Reality is a creation of our excesses.