Emil Cioran quotes - page 16

A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints. (Emil Cioran)
From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters. View quote
Emil Cioran
I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness. View quote
Emil Cioran
The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world. View quote
Emil Cioran
If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live? View quote
Emil Cioran
Awareness of time: assault on time... View quote
Emil Cioran
Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness. View quote
Emil Cioran
Heroes abound at the dawn of civilizations, during pre-Homeric and Gothic epochs, when people, not having yet experienced spiritual torture, satisfy their thirst for renunciation through a derivative: heroism. View quote
Emil Cioran
If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity. View quote
Emil Cioran
Impossible to accede to truth by opinions, for each opinion is only a mad perspective of reality. View quote
Emil Cioran
I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end. (Emil Cioran)
The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it. Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing? View quote
Emil Cioran
We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false. View quote
Emil Cioran
Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it. View quote
Emil Cioran
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. View quote
Emil Cioran
Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else? View quote
Emil Cioran
The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich. View quote
Emil Cioran
Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves - that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it. View quote
Emil Cioran
To think is to run after insecurity, to be demoralized for grandiose trifles, to immure oneself in abstractions with a martyr's avidity, to hunt up complications the way others pursue collapse or gain. The thinker is by definition keen for torment. View quote
Emil Cioran
The real, the unique misfortune: to see the light of day. A disaster which dates back to aggressiveness, to the seed of expansion and rage within origins, to the tendency to the worst which first shook them up. View quote
Emil Cioran
History shows that the thinkers who mounted on the top of the ladder of questions, who set their foot on the last rung, that of the absurd, have bequeathed to posterity only an example of sterility. (Emil Cioran)
The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them. View quote
Emil Cioran
Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion. View quote
Emil Cioran
Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun. View quote
Emil Cioran
Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been. View quote
Emil Cioran