Emil Cioran quotes - page 8

Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself - there is no wish I make more often. (Emil Cioran)
Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands? View quote
Emil Cioran
A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people. View quote
Emil Cioran
I am displeased with everything. If they made me God, I would immediately resign. View quote
Emil Cioran
One of the biggest paradoxes of our world: memories vanish when we want to remember, but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget. View quote
Emil Cioran
Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity. View quote
Emil Cioran
The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life. View quote
Emil Cioran
Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event? View quote
Emil Cioran
Existing is plagiarism. View quote
Emil Cioran
We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle. View quote
Emil Cioran
So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined. (Emil Cioran)
I seem to myself, among civilised men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers. View quote
Emil Cioran
Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin. View quote
Emil Cioran
Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise. View quote
Emil Cioran
Out of the shadow of the abstract man, who thinks for the pleasure of thinking, emerges the organic man, who thinks because of a vital imbalance, and who is beyond science and art. View quote
Emil Cioran
One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death's prisoner. View quote
Emil Cioran
Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don't know, and we don't really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless. View quote
Emil Cioran
Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism. View quote
Emil Cioran
Pursued by our origins...we all are. View quote
Emil Cioran
Born in a prison, with burdens on our shoulders and our thoughts, we could not reach the end of a single day if the possibilities of ending it all did not incite us to begin the next day all over again. View quote
Emil Cioran
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. (Emil Cioran)
What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free? View quote
Emil Cioran
Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world. View quote
Emil Cioran
Detachment from the world as an attachment to the ego... Who can realize the detachment in which you are as far away from yourself as you are from the world? View quote
Emil Cioran
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. View quote
Emil Cioran