Emil Cioran quotes - page 12

To make more plans than an explorer or a crook, yet to be infected at the will's very root. (Emil Cioran)
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. View quote
Emil Cioran
We say: he has no talent, only tone. But tone is precisely what cannot be invented - we're born with it. Tone is an inherited grace, the privilege some of us have of making our organic pulsations felt - tone is more than talent, it is its essence. View quote
Emil Cioran
I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything. View quote
Emil Cioran
The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It's not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul. View quote
Emil Cioran
Why don't I kill myself? If I knew exactly what keeps me from doing so, I should have no more questions to ask myself since I should have answered them all. View quote
Emil Cioran
We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface... View quote
Emil Cioran
By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping. View quote
Emil Cioran
To repeat to yourself a thousand times a day: 'Nothing on Earth has any worth,' to keep finding yourself at the same point, to circle stupidly as a top, eternally... View quote
Emil Cioran
Everyone is mistaken, everyone lives in illusion. At best, we can admit a scale of fictions, a hierarchy of unrealities, giving preference to one rather than to another; but to choose, no, definitely not that... View quote
Emil Cioran
Late at night. I feel like falling into a frenzy, doing some unprecedented thing to release myself, but I don't see against whom, against what... (Emil Cioran)
No longer ask me for my program: isn't breathing one? View quote
Emil Cioran
There are no arguments. Can anyone who has reached the limit bother with arguments, causes, effects, moral considerations, and so forth? Of course not. For such a person there are only unmotivated motives for living. On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos. When all the current reasons - moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on - no longer guide one's life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing. View quote
Emil Cioran
To withstand any truth... View quote
Emil Cioran
It is debasing to die the way one does; it is intolerable to be exposed to an end over which we have no control, an end which lies in wait for us, overthrows us, casts us into the unnameable. View quote
Emil Cioran
The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release. View quote
Emil Cioran
You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life. View quote
Emil Cioran
Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off. View quote
Emil Cioran
The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary. View quote
Emil Cioran
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten. View quote
Emil Cioran
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his? (Emil Cioran)
To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring. View quote
Emil Cioran
Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all. View quote
Emil Cioran
A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society. View quote
Emil Cioran
No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent. View quote
Emil Cioran