Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.
Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.
If I used to ask myself, over a coffin, "what good did it do the occupant to be born?" I now put the same question about anyone alive.
The Creation was the first act of sabotage.
To say "everything is illusory" is to court illusion, to accord it a high degree of reality, the highest in fact, whereas on the contrary one wanted to discredit it. The solution? To stop proclaiming or denouncing it, serving it by thinking about it. The very idea that disqualifies all ideas is a fetter.
Detachment from the world as an attachment to the ego… Who can realize the detachment in which you are as far away from yourself as you are from the world?
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!
To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.
Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.
The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy.
From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.
We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.
In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future.
The cynicism of utter solitude is a calvary relieved by insolence.
A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...
"Never judge a man without putting yourself in his place." This old proverb makes all judgment impossible, for we judge someone only because, in fact, we cannot put ourselves in his place.
A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
That fear which gives birth to thoughts, and the fear of thoughts…