Emil Cioran quotes - page 21

Two enemies - the same man divided. (Emil Cioran)
The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character - precisely that and nothing more.
Emil Cioran
Self-knowledge - the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?
Emil Cioran
In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.
Emil Cioran
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.
Emil Cioran
If I used to ask myself, over a coffin, "what good did it do the occupant to be born?" I now put the same question about anyone alive.
Emil Cioran
The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.
Emil Cioran
"What's wrong - what's the matter with you?" Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for...
Emil Cioran
Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again.
Emil Cioran
To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement.
Emil Cioran
Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying? - that void is consciousness itself. (Emil Cioran)
There is no false sensation.
Emil Cioran
"Neither this world, nor the next, nor happiness are for the being abandoned to doubt." - This point in the Gita is my death sentence.
Emil Cioran
I want to proclaim a truth that would forever exile me from among the living. I know only the conditions but not the words that would allow me to formulate it.
Emil Cioran
As soon as one returns to Doubt (if it could be said that one has ever left it), undertaking anything at all seems not so much useless as extravagant. Doubt works deep within you like a disease, or even more effectively, like a faith.
Emil Cioran
How can you know if you are in the truth? The criterion is simple enough: if others make a vacuum around you, there is not a doubt in the world that you are closer to the essential than they are.
Emil Cioran
The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous.
Emil Cioran
We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.
Emil Cioran
Eternity is absence.
Emil Cioran
Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man.
Emil Cioran
When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years. (Emil Cioran)
Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god.
Emil Cioran
If I were to go blind, what would bother me the most would be no longer to be able to stare idiotically at the passing clouds.
Emil Cioran
When we know what words are worth, the amazing thing is that we try to say anything at all, and that we manage to do so. This requires, it is true, a supernatural nerve.
Emil Cioran
Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream.
Emil Cioran