Best 48 quotes of Emil Cioran on MyQuotes

A iubi înseamnă a suferi şi cum mulţi fug de suferinţă, puţini ştiu să iubească.

Animal banished from life, man's condition is tragic, for he no longer finds fulfillment in life's simple values. For animals, life is all there is; for man, life is a question mark. An irreversible question mark, for man has never found, nor will ever find, any answers. Life not only has no meaning; it can never have one.

Artă de a fi psiholog nu se învață, ci se trăiește și se experimentează, deoarece nu există un complex de canoane care să-ți dea cheia misterelor pshice, a structurilor diferențiale ale vieții sufletești. Nu ești un psiholog bun dacă tu însuți nu ești un subiect de studiat, dacă materialul tău psihic nu oferă zilnic o complexitate și un inedit care să excite curiozitatea ta continuă. Nu te poți iniția în misterul altuia, dacă tu însuți n-ai un mister în care să te inițiezi.

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 . . .

Avoir commis tous les crimes, hormis celui d'être père

But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle. . .

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

Ceea ce am mai bun în mine se datorează suferinței. Nu o iubesc, dar nici nu o condamn.

Cheia pentru inexplicabilul soartei noastre este setea de nefericire, adîncă şi tainică şi mai durabilă ca dorinţa zvăpăiată de fericire. De-ar predomina aceasta, cum am lămuri îndepărtarea vertiginoasă de rai şi tragedia ca o condiţie firească? Istoria întreagă e proba limpede că omul nu numai că n-a fugit de chin, dar i-a născocit mreje, pentru a nu scăpa cumva din vraja lui. Dacă n-ar fi iubit durerea, n-ar fi avut nevoie să născocească iadul — utopie a suferinţei. Şi dac-a preferat uneori cu mai multă ardoare raiul, a făcut-o pentru fantasticul lui, pentru garanţia de irealizabil — o utopie estetică. „Evenimentele“ istoriei ne arată însă clar ce a luat el în serios...

Compassion is a sign of superficiality: broken destinies and unrelenting misery either make you scream or turn you to stone.

Croire qu’il lui appartient de dépasser sa condition et de s’orienter vers celle de surhomme, c’est oublier qu’il a du mal à tenir le coup en tant qu’homme, et qu’il n’y parvient qu’à force de tendre sa volonté, son ressort, au maximum.

Dans les époques de stérilité, on devrait hiberner, dormir jour et nuit pour conserver ses forces, au lieu de les dépenser en mortifications et en rages.

Despair is the state in which anxiety and restlessness are immanent to existence. Nobody in despair suffers from “problems”, but from his own inner torment and fire. It’s a pity that nothing can be solved in this world. Yet there never was and there never will be anyone who would commit suicide for this reason. So much for the power that intellectual anxiety has over the total anxiety of our being! That is why I prefer the dramatic life, consumed by inner fires and tortured by destiny, to the intellectual, caught up in abstractions which do not engage the essence of our subjectivity. I despise the absence of risks, madness and passion in abstract thinking. How fertile live, passionate thinking is! Lyricism feeds it like blood pumped into the heart!

En un mundo sin melancolía, los ruiseñores se pondrían a eructar.

Every phenomenon is a corrupt version of another, larger phenomenon: time, a disease of eternity; history, a disease of time; life, again, a disease of matter. Then what is normal, what is healthy? Eternity? Which itself is only an infirmity of God.

Every work turns against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action. Destruction awaits anyone who, answering to his vocation and fulfilling it, exerts himself within history; only the man who sacrifices every gift and talent escapes: released from his humanity, he may lodge himself in Being. (...) One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.

Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life.

Femeia-i Paradisul ca noapte.

For the normal man, life is an undisputed reality; only the sick man is delighted by life and praises it so that he won't collapse.

I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide...

If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.

If we could understand and love the infinity of agonies which languish around us, all the lives which are hidden deaths, we should require as many hearts as there are suffering beings.

I have recommended you the dignity of skepticism: yet here I am, prowling around the Absolute. Technique of contradiction? Remember, rather, what Flaubert said: "I am a mystic and I believe in nothing".

Il ne fait aucun doute pour moi que la sagesse est le but principal de la vie et c'est pourquoi je reviens toujours aux stoïciens. Ils ont atteint la sagesse, on ne peut donc plus les appeler des philosophes au sens propre du terme. De mon point de vue, la sagesse est le terme naturel de la philosophie, sa fin dans les deux sens du mot. Une philosophie finit en sagesse et par là même disparaît.

Magnificat de Bach. Remué jusqu'aux larmes. Il est impossible que ce qui s'y exprime n'ait qu'une réalité subjective. L'« âme » doit être de la même essence que l'absolu. Et c'est le Vedânta qui a raison.

Né avec une âme habituelle, j'en ai demandé une autre à la musique : ce fut le début de malheurs inespérés.

Nero would be long since forgotten without his outbursts of bloody clowning. ~ Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

No one is responsible for what he is nor even for what he does. This is obvious and everyone more or less agrees that it is so. Then why celebrate or denigrate? Because to exist is to evaluate, to emit judgments, and because abstention, when it is not the effect of apathy or cowardice, requires an effort no one manages to make.

Only god has the privilege of abandoning us. Men can only drop us

On voudrait parfois être cannibale, moins pour le plaisir de dévorer tel ou tel que  pour celui de le vomir.

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.

Qu'est-ce qu'une crucifixion unique, auprès de celle, quotidienne, qu'endure l'insomniaque?

Règle d'or : laisser une image incomplète de soi...

Sînt oameni cărora le este dat să guste numai otrava din lucruri, pentru care orice surpriză este o surpriză dureroasă și orice experiență un nou prilej de tortură. Dacă se va spune că această suferință își are motive subiective, ținînd de o constituție particulară, voi întreba: există un criteriu obiectiv pentru aprecierea suferinței? Cine ar putea preciza că vecinul meu suferă mai mult decît mine sau că Isus a suferit mai mult decît toți? Nu există măsură obiectivă, deoarece ea nu se măsoară după excitația exterioară sau indispoziția locală a organismului, ci după modul în care suferința este simțită și reflectată în conștiință.

So long as our untried senses and our naïve heart recognize themselves and delight in the universe of qualifications, they flourish with the aid and at the risk of the adjective, which, once dissected, proves inadequate, deficient. We say of space, of time, and of suffering that they are infinite; but infinite has no more bearing than beautiful, sublime, harmonious, ugly.... Suppose we force ourselves to see to the bottom of words? We see nothing—each of them, detached from the expansive and fertile soul, being null and void. The power of the intelligence functions by projecting a certain luster upon them, by polishing them and making them glitter; this power, erected into a system, is called culture—pryrotechnics against a night sky of nothingness.

That there should be a reality hidden behind appearances is, after all, quite possible; that language might render such a thing would be an absurd hope.

The one who had not ever conceived his own annulment, who had not foreseen the resource of the cord, the bullet, the poison or the sea, is a debased prisoner or a crawling worm on the cosmic carrion. This world can take off us everything, it can forbid us everything, but nobody can't prevent us our self-abolition.

There are people who are destined to taste only the poison in things, for whom any surprise is a painful surprise and any experience a new occasion for torture. if someone were to say to me that such suffering has subjective reasons, related to the individual's particular makeup, i would then ask; is there an objective criterion for evaluating suffering? who can say with precision that my neighbor suffers more than i do or that jesus suffered more than all of us? there is no objective standard because suffering cannot be measured according to the external stimulation or local irritation of the organism, but only as it is felt and reflected in consciousness. alas, from this point of view, any hierarchy is out of the question. each person remains with his own suffering, which he believes absolute and unlimited. how much would we diminish our own personal suffering if we were to compare it to all the world's sufferings until now, to the most horrifying agonies and the most complicated tortures, the mostcruel deaths and the most painful betrayals, all the lepers, all those burned alive or starved to death? nobody is comforted in his sufferings by the thought that we are all mortals, nor does anybody who suffers really find comfort in the past or present suffering of others. because in this organically insufficient and fragmentary world, the individual is set to live fully, wishing to make of his own existence an absolute.

The sense that everything is going wrong has existed in every era, and rightly so since men have found no greater pleasure than in inventing new ways to make each other miserable.

The terrifying experience and obsession of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of yourself. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness.

This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears.

Ţi-a făcut cineva rău? Dospeşte ura-n tine, răsuceşte-ţi amarul tainic, frige-ţi vinele clocotitoare. În nopţi, cînd te cuprinde liniştea vastă, nu cădea-n uitarea destructivă a meditaţiei - arde-ţi cu durere şi furie tărăgănarea cărnii, înfige-ţi veninul năpraznic în măruntaiele duşmanului. Cum ai prelungi altfel vieţuirea searbădă?

To dissect a poem as if it were a system is a crime, even a sacrilege.

Tristetea, ca si suferinta, ne revela existenta, deoarece în ele avem în constiinta separatia noastra de lumea obiectiva si nelinistea care da un caracter tragic vietuirii în existenta. Daca ar exista un zeu al tristetii, lui nu i-ar putea creste decât aripi negre si grele, pentru a zbura nu înspre ceruri, ci în infern.

Vivir: especializarse en el error. Burlarse de las verdades indubitadas, no hacer caso de lo absoluto, tomar a broma la muerte y transformar lo infinito en azar

We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

We breathe too fast to be able to grasp things in themselves or to expose their fragility. Our panting postulates and distorts them, creates and disfigures them, and binds us to them. I bestir myself, therefore I emit a world as suspect as my speculation which justifies it; I espouse movement, which changes me into a generator of being, into an artisan of fictions, while my cosmogonic verve makes me forget that, led on by the whirlwind of acts, I am nothing but an acolyte of time, an agent of decrepit universes. (...) If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

What they ask you for is actions, proofs, works, and all you can produce are transformed tears.