Quotes from Emil M. Cioran

BaÅŸlang?çta ÅŸeylerden kaçmak için düÅŸünürüz; sonra fazla uzaÄŸa gittiÄŸimizde, kaç???m?z?n piÅŸmanl???yla kendimizi mahvetmek için...

Bütün hakikatler bize kar??d?r. Ama yaÅŸamaya devam ederiz çünkü onlar? olduklar? gibi kabulleniriz, çünkü onlardan sonuç ç?karmay? reddederiz.

What right have you to pray for me? I need no intercessor, I shall manage alone.

The right to suppress everyone that bothers us should rank first in the constitution of the ideal State.

The most serious disadvantage a Christian encounters is that of not being able to serve consciously more than one god, though he has the latitude to adhere, in practice, to several (the worship of saints!). A salutary adherence which has permitted polytheism to continue, in spite of everything, indirectly. Without it, an excessively pure Christianity would not have failed to found a universal schizophrenia.

Man gives off a special odor: of all the animals, he alone smells of the corpse.

The prayers of a wretch I might accept, but no one else's, not even a saint's.

I cannot bear your bothering about my salvation.

With sufficient perspective, nothing is good or bad. The historian who ventures to judge the past is writing journalism in another century.

I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if, creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity.

The worst crimes are committed out of enthusiasm, a morbid state responsible for almost all public and private disasters.

We change cures, finding none effective, none valid, because we have faith neither in the peace we seek nor in the pleasures we pursue.

There exists an undeniable pleasure in knowing that everything you do has no real basis, that whether or not you commit an action is a matter of indifference. The fact nonetheless remains that in our daily gestures we compromise with Vacuity - that is, we turn and turn about, and occasionally, at the same time, we take the world as real and unreal. We mingle pure truth and sordid truths and this amalgam, the thinker's disgrace, is the living man's revenge.

De ceux qui ne diffusent pas autour d'eux un relent d'échec, on peut difficilement dire qu'ils ont vécu. La décomposition est la seule trace que laisse la marche de la vie, cet étrange pourrissement de la matière. Création et destruction sont les différentes directions d'une même substance qui s'affirme en s'effilochant.

That faint light in each of us which dates back to before our birth, to before all births, is what must be protected if we want to rejoin that remote glory from which we shall never know why we were separated.

Suffering opens our eyes, helps us to see what we would not have seen otherwise.

This is because failure, always essential, reveals us to ourselves, permits us to see ourselves as God sees us, whereas success distances us from what is most inward in ourselves and indeed in everything.

Birth and chain are synonyms. To see the light of day, to see shackles . . .

Invest them elsewhere; in any case, we do not serve the same gods.

It is disturbing to think that we carry our secret – our illusion – into the grave, that we have not survived the mysterious mistake that vivified our every breath, that, except for the sceptics and whores among us, all founder in falsehood because they fail to divine the equivalence, in nullity, of triumphs and truths.

I have never known a single sensation of fulfillment, of true happiness, without thinking that it was the moment when — now or never — I should disappear for good.

A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after the autopsy, is less than a corpse.

Sloth is a somatic scepticism, the way the flesh doubts.

Quand on sait de façon absolue que tout est irréel, on ne voit vraiment pas pourquoi on se fatiguerait à le prouver.