Quotes from Emil M. Cioran

The ideal: to be able to repeat oneself like... Bach.

Les ravages de la "civilisation" sont si évidents qu'on a honte de les signaler encore.

Ibiza me réussit aussi mal que Valldemosa à Chopin.

We cherish our anathemas, greedy for what pulverizes us; not for anything would we renounce our own nightmare to which we have assigned as many capital letters as we have known illusions. These illusions have been discredited, like the capital letters, but the nightmare remains, decapitated and naked, and we continue to love it precisely because it is ours and because we do not see what to replace it by.

Kandinsky maintains that yellow is the color of life... Now we know why this hue so hurts the eyes.

At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j'ai mal.

I may change my opinion on the same subject, the same event, ten, twenty, thirty times in the course of a single day. And to think that each time, like the worst impostor, I dare utter the word "truth"!

This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else.

After the Spanish publication of the 'Précis,' two Andalusian students asked me if it was possible to live without 'fundamentación.' I answered that it was true that I had found no solid basis anywhere and that I had nonetheless managed to endure, for with the years one got used to everything, even vertigo. Then, too, one does not constantly keep watch and interrogate oneself, absolute lucidity being incompatible with breathing.

I try to oppose the interest I take in her, I imagine her eyes, her cheeks, her nose, her lips in a high state of putrefaction. No help for it: the indefinable element she releases persists. It is in such moments that one understands why life has managed to sustain itself, in spite of Knowledge.

To know, in vulgar terms, is to get over something: to know, in absolute terms, is to get over everything. Illumination represents one further step: the certainty that henceforth we will never again be taken in, a last glance at illusion.

All men see fires, storms, explosions, or landscapes; but how many feel the flames, the lightnings, the whirlwinds, or the harmony? How many have an inner beauty that tinges their melancholy? For the indifferent, to whom nature offers an insipid and cold objectivity, life even when fully enjoyed is a sum of missed opportunities. — Emil M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair . (University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition October 1, 1996) Originally published 1933.

Vivere: specializzarsi nell'errore

When I despise myself, I tell myself, in order to shore up my confidence, that, after all, I have managed to maintain myself in being or in a semblance of being, with a perception of things that very few could have endured.

The one sincere confession is the one we make indirectly - when we talk about other people.

Each time I catch myself assigning some importance to things, I incriminate my mind, I challenge it and suspect it of some weakness, of some depravity.

todos los males de la vida vienen de una «concepción de la vida».

Where does happiness begin? When we have persuaded ourselves that there is no truth. All salvation comes thenceforth, even salvation through nothing. He who does not believe in the impossibility of truth, or does not rejoice in it, has only one road to salvation, which he will, however, never find.

Our self-knowledge annoys and paralyzes our daimon—this is where we should look for the reason Socrates wrote nothing.

A mesure que l'art s'enfonce dans l'impasse, les artistes se multiplient. Cette anomalie cesse d'en être une, si l'on songe que l'art, en voie d'épuisement, est devenu à la fois impossible et facile.

When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.

Il semplice fatto di esistere è talmente grave che, a paragone, Dio non è che un mero trastullo.

I try to wrest myself from everything, to raise myself by uprooting myself; in order to become futile, we must sever our roots, must become metaphysically alien.

Mine still, this moment passes by, escapes me, and is buried forever. Am I going to commit myself with the next? I make up my mind: it is here, it belongs to me — and already is long since past. From morning to night, fabricating the past!