Quotes from Emil M. Cioran

It may very well be tht man's sole purpose is none other than to think of god. If we could either love him or ignore him we would be saved.

The mind's 'seasons' are conditioned by an organic rhythm; it is not up to 'me' to be naïve or cynical: my truths are the sophisms of my enthusiasm or of my dejection.

As the years accumulate, we form an increasingly somber image of the future.

Enlightened despotism: the only regime that can attract a disabused mind, one incapable of being the accomplice of revolutions since it is not even the accomplice of history.

A well-proportioned sentence, satisfied with its equilibrium or swollen with its sonority, all too often conceals the malaise of a mind incapable of acceding by sensation to an original universe.

Every vanquished desire affords us power.

If, as we grow older, we scrutinize our own past at the expense of 'problems', it is simply because we handle memories more readily than ideas.

Meditate but one hour upon the self's nonexistence and you will feel yourself to be another man," said a priest of the Japanese Kusha sect

If we do not regard ourselves as entrusted with a mission, existence is difficult; action, impossible.

Todas as nossas humilhações provêm de que não podemos resolver-nos a morrer de fome. Pagamos caro esta covardia. Viver em função dos homens, sem vocação de mendigo! Rebaixar-se ante esses macacos engravatados, sortudos, enfatuados! Estar à mercê dessas caricaturas indignas até de desprezo!

The passion for prophesying then seizes everyone; skeptics and fanatics alike delight in the idea of disaster and give themselves up in concert to the pleasure of having foreseen and trumpeted it abroad. But it is especially the theoreticians of Reaction who exult (tragically, no doubt) over the reality or the imminence of the worst - of the worst that is their raison d'être.

Expression diminishes you, impoverishes you, lifts weights off you: expression is loss of substance, and liberation.

Apaixonado pelos vocábulos, odiava os mistérios dos silêncios pesados e os tornava leves e puros: e ele próprio tornou-se leve e puro, já que aliviado e purificado de tudo. O vício de definir fez dele um assassino gracioso e uma vítima discreta.

With Baudelaire, physiology entered into poetry; with Nietzsche, into philosophy. By them, the troubles of the organs were raised to song, to concept. With health the one thing proscribed, it was incumbent upon them to afford disease a career.

We have the more hold over this world the further we withdraw from it, the less we adhere to it.

An inexorable law strikes and directs societies and civilizations. When, for lack of vitality, the past collapses, clinging to it serves no purpose - and yet it is this attachment to antiquated forms of life, to lost or bad causes, that makes so touching the anathemas of a de Maistre or a Bonald. Everything seems admirable and everything is false in the Utopian vision; everything is execrable and everything seems true in the observations of the reactionaries.

He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one.

The more injured you are by time, the more you seek to escape it.

I draw the curtains, and I wait. Actually, I am not waiting for anything, I am merely making myself absent. Scoured, if only for a few minutes, of the impurities which dim and clog the mind, I accede to a state of consciousness from which the self is evacuated, And I am as soothed as if I were resting outside the universe.

Man is free—and sterile—only in the interval when the gods die; slave—and creative—only in the interval when, as tyrants, they flourish.

The book which, after demolishing everything, fails to demolish itself will have exasperated us to no purpose.

In any book governed by the Fragment, truths and whims keep company throughout.

If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.

A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth, where our mania for salvation makes life unbreathable.