Emil Cioran quotes - page 19

Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith - of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever. The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth. We are unfair to a Nero, a Tiberius: it was not they who invented the concept heretic: they were only degenerate dreamers who happened to be entertained by massacres. The real criminals are men who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic. (Emil Cioran)
Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation. View quote
Emil Cioran
I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity. View quote
Emil Cioran
In a single second we do away with all seconds; God himself could not do as much. View quote
Emil Cioran
You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness. View quote
Emil Cioran
As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad. View quote
Emil Cioran
Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life. View quote
Emil Cioran
We suffer: the external world begins to exist . . . ; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality. View quote
Emil Cioran
If someone incessantly drops the word "life," you know he's a sick man. View quote
Emil Cioran
Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it. View quote
Emil Cioran
You have dreamed of setting the world ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light up a single one! (Emil Cioran)
What anxiety when one is not sure of one's doubts or wonders: are these actually doubts? View quote
Emil Cioran
In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future. View quote
Emil Cioran
Without its assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation? View quote
Emil Cioran
The moment we believe we've understood everything grants us the look of a murderer. View quote
Emil Cioran
On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I." View quote
Emil Cioran
Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious. View quote
Emil Cioran
The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to form a reality to reality's detriment. View quote
Emil Cioran
The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning. View quote
Emil Cioran
The wrinkles of a nation are as visible as those of an individual. View quote
Emil Cioran
Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself. (Emil Cioran)
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. View quote
Emil Cioran
We are all secularised anarchists today. View quote
Emil Cioran
Creation is in fact a fault, man's famous sin thereby appearing as a minor version of a much graver one. What are we guilty of, except of having followed, more or less slavishly, the Creator's example? Easy to recognize in ourselves the fatality which was His: not for nothing have we issued from the hands of a wicked and woebegone god, a god accursed. View quote
Emil Cioran
It is difficult, it is impossible to believe that the Good Lord - "Our Father" - had a hand in the scandal of creation. Everything suggests that He took no part in it, that it proceeds from a god without scruples, a feculent god. Goodness does not create, lacking imagination; it takes imagination to put together a world, however botched. At the very least, there must be a mixture of good and evil in order to produce an action or a work. View quote
Emil Cioran