Emil Cioran
38 quotes
Biography
"A book is a suicide postponed."
"Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows."
"The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one."
"Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us."
"To live entirely without a goal! I have glimpsed this state, and have often attained it, without managing to remain there: I am too weak for such happiness."
"Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic."
"By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing."
"Nu pot fi eu insumi decat daca ma inalt pana la furie sau cobor pana la descurajare: la nivelul meu obisnuit, ignor faptul ca exist."
"As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think."
"The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live-moreover, the only one."
"I try--without success--to stop finding reasons for vanity in anything. When I happen to manage it nonetheless, I feel that I no longer belong to the mortal gang. I am above everything then, above the gods themselves. Perhaps that is what death is: a sensation of great, of extreme superiority."
"Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact."
"Tristetea, ca si suferinta, ne revela existenta, deoarece în ele avem în constiinta separatia noastra de lumea obiectiva si nelinistea care da un caracter tragic vietuirii în existenta.Daca ar exista un zeu al tristetii, lui nu i-ar putea creste decât aripi negre si grele, pentru a zbura nu înspre ceruri, ci în infern."
"In numele si sub teroarea ei (plictiselii, n.m.) parasesc oamenii caminul si moartea agreabila legata de el si se avanta in lume, spre a muri undeva fara acoperis si fara lacrimi; adolescentii se gandesc la sinucideri in zile infinite de primavara, iar servitoarele fara amanti se lamenteaza duminicile, de parca inima lor e un cimitir in care mortii nu pot dormi."
"Can it really be that for us existence means exile, and nothingness, home?"
"I have no ideas, only obsessions. Anybody can have ideas. Ideas have never caused anybody’s downfall."
"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."
"Doutbless, revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim, or else we are tangled in the subtleties of remorse; so vengeance too has its venom, though it comes closer to what we are, to what we feel, to the very law of the self; it is also healthier than magnanimity. The Furies were held to antedate the gods, Zeus included. Vengeance before Divinity! This is the Major intuition of ancient mythology."
"We are all secularised anarchists today."
"Love, a tacit agreement between two unhappy parties to overestimate each other."
"There is only this swarm of dying creatures stricken with longevity, all the more hateful in that they are so good at organizing their agony."
"He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama."
"In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left—ignorant how to react—with a foolish grin"
"Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that we alone pursue the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear."
"If instead of expanding you, putting you in a state of energetic euphoria, your ordeals depress and embitter you, you can be sure you have no spiritual vocation."