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Irrationalist
There is much speaking about Emil Cioran in Thomas Ligotti and Matt Cardin essays. Good. What it is not so good is the quality and the depth of your understanding of Cioran. Not the understanding of the works of Cioran but of Cioran, the human being. I have a simple question to Matt Cardin: beside the faux stand-up comedy nihilism and the slippery show-offnes of "Emile M." Cioran, can you tell me the names of the two major Christian figures for whom Cioran was forever in debt and to whom he will return until the end of his life?
"There is no negator who is not hungry for some catastrophic yes."
"God is, even if he isn't."
A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.Emile M. Cioran
A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.Emile M. Cioran
A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.Emile M. Cioran
A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and it's tomb.Emile M. Cioran
A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.Emile M. Cioran
Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.Emile M. Cioran
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.Emile M. Cioran
Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.Emile M. Cioran
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.Emile M. Cioran
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.Emile M. Cioran
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.Emile M. Cioran
Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.Emile M. Cioran
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.Emile M. Cioran
Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.Emile M. Cioran
Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.Emile M. Cioran
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.Emile M. Cioran
Everything is pathology, except for indifference.Emile M. Cioran
For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.Emile M. Cioran
Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?Emile M. Cioran
God - a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.Emile M. Cioran
Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.Emile M. Cioran
I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.Emile M. Cioran
I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.Emile M. Cioran
I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?Emile M. Cioran
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
Emile M. Cioran
If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.Emile M. Cioran
In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.Emile M. Cioran
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.Emile M. Cioran
In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.Emile M. Cioran
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.Emile M. Cioran
Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?Emile M. Cioran
It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.Emile M. Cioran
It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.Emile M. Cioran
Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.Emile M. Cioran
Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.Emile M. Cioran
Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.Emile M. Cioran
Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.Emile M. Cioran
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.Emile M. Cioran
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.Emile M. Cioran
Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
Emile M. Cioran
My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.Emile M. Cioran
No human beings are more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.Emile M. Cioran
No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.Emile M. Cioran
No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.Emile M. Cioran
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.Emile M. Cioran
Not to be obliged, like so many others, to choose between the insipid and the atrocious.Emile M. Cioran
Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.Emile M. Cioran
Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.Emile M. Cioran
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.Emile M. Cioran
One hardly saves a world without ruling it.Emile M. Cioran
Our first intuitions are the true ones.Emile M. Cioran
Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.Emile M. Cioran
Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.Emile M. Cioran
Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.Emile M. Cioran
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.Emile M. Cioran
Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.Emile M. Cioran
Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.Emile M. Cioran
Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.Emile M. Cioran
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.Emile M. Cioran
So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.Emile M. Cioran
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.Emile M. Cioran
Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.Emile M. Cioran
Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.Emile M. Cioran
The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.Emile M. Cioran
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.Emile M. Cioran
The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.Emile M. Cioran
The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.Emile M. Cioran
The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.Emile M. Cioran
The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.Emile M. Cioran
The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.Emile M. Cioran
The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.Emile M. Cioran
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.Emile M. Cioran
The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.Emile M. Cioran
The Universal view melts things into a blur.Emile M. Cioran
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.Emile M. Cioran
To act is to anchor in the imminent future.Emile M. Cioran
To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.Emile M. Cioran
To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.Emile M. Cioran
To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.Emile M. Cioran
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.Emile M. Cioran
Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.Emile M. Cioran
Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
Emile M. Cioran
Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.Emile M. Cioran
Under each formula lies a corpse.Emile M. Cioran
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.Emile M. Cioran
We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.Emile M. Cioran
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.Emile M. Cioran
We derive our vitality from our store of madness.Emile M. Cioran
We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.Emile M. Cioran
We inhabit a language rather than a country.Emile M. Cioran
We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.Emile M. Cioran
We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.Emile M. Cioran
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?Emile M. Cioran
What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.Emile M. Cioran
What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.Emile M. Cioran
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?Emile M. Cioran
When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
Emile M. Cioran
Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.Emile M. Cioran
Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.Emile M. Cioran
Word - that invisible dagger.Emile M. Cioran
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.Emile M. Cioran“Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.”
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I Like this quote I dislike this quote“No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.”
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I Like this quote I dislike this quote“A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.”
Emile M. Cioran quoteSimilar Quotes. Add to Chapter...
I Like this quote I dislike this quote“Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.”
Emile M. Cioran quoteSimilar Quotes. Add to Chapter...
I Like this quote I dislike this quote“One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.”
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I Like this quote I dislike this quote“The beauty of flames lies in their strange play, beyond all proportion and harmony. Their diaphanous flare symbolizes at once grace and tragedy, innocence and despair, sadness and voluptuousness. The burning transcendence has something of the lightness of great purifications. I wish the fiery transcendence would carry me up and throw me into a sea of flames, where, consumed by their delicate and insidious tongues, I would die an ecstatic death. The beauty of flames creates the illusion of a pure, sublime death similar to the light of dawn. Immaterial, death in flames is like a burning of light, graceful wings. Do only butterflies die in flames? What about those devoured by the flames within them?” sixsixsick
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I Like this quote I dislike this quote“You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the "mystery" of life.”
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I Like this quote I dislike this quote“The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.” teardrop
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I Like this quote I dislike this quote“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
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Add to Chapter...
I Like this quote I dislike this quote“Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.”
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Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.-
Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.-
A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.-
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.-
Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.-
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.-
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.-
Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.-
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.-
You are done for--a living dead man--not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the "mystery" of life.-
From denial to denial, his existence is diminished: vaguer and more unreal than a syllogism of sighs, how could he still be a creature of flesh and blood? Anemic, he rivals the Idea itself; he has abstracted himself from his ancestors, from his friends, from every soul and himself; in his veins, once turbulent, rests a light from another world. Liberated from what he has lived, unconcerned by what he will live; he demolishes the signposts on all his roads, and wrests himself from the dials of all time. "I shall never meet myself again," he decides, happy to turn his last hatred against himself, happier still to annihilate--in his forgiveness--all beings, all things.- A Short History of Decay
Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.- Drawn and Quartered
Our contortions, visible or secret, we communicate to the planet; already it trembles even as we do, it suffers the contagion of our crises and, as this grand mal spreads, it vomits us forth, cursing us the while.- Drawn and Quartered
Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.- The New Gods
Saints live in flames, wisemen, next to them.- Tears and Saints
To live is to lose ground.- The Trouble with Being Born
Man is unacceptable.- The Trouble with Being Born
Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.- The Trouble with Being Born
Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.- The Trouble with Being Born
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.- The Trouble with Being Born
Life is nothing; death, everything. Yet there is nothing which is death, independent of life. It is precisely this absence of autonomous, distinct reality which makes death universal; it has no realm of its own, it is omnipresent, like everything which lacks identity, limit, and bearing: an indecent infinitude.- The Trouble with Being Born
Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil. It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.- The Trouble with Being Born
It is because of speech that men give the illusion of being free. By speaking, they deceive themselves, as they deceive others: because they say what they are going to do, who could suspect they are not masters of their actions?- The Trouble with Being Born
I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations. I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.- The Trouble with Being Born
The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.- The Trouble with Being Born
Each time you find yourself at a turning point, the best thing is to lie down and let hours pass. Resolutions made standing up are worthless: they are dictated either by pride or by fear. Prone, we still know these two scourges, but in a more attenuated, more intemporal form.- The Trouble with Being Born
A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.- The Trouble with Being Born
Our first intuitions are the true ones.- The Trouble with Being Born
I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.- The Trouble with Being Born
Man is a robot with defects.
EMILE CIORAN, The Trouble With Being Born
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
EMILE CIORAN, The New Gods
Utopia is the grotesque en rose, the need to associate happiness -- that is, the improbable -- with becoming, and to coerce an optimistic, aerial vision to the point where it rejoins its own source: the very cynicism it sought to combat. In short, a monstrous fantasy.
E.M. CIORAN, History and Utopia
Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.
E.M. CIORAN, History and Utopia
If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame.
EMILE CIORAN, A Short History of Decay
Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind.
EMILE CIORAN, A Short History of Decay
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.
EMILE CIORAN, A Short History of Decay
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.Topic: Books and ReadingSource: NoneMan must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.Topic: Death / ImmortalitySource: NoneAnyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.Topic: DreamsSource: NoneThe fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.Topic: Fanaticism
Source: NoneTyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise.Topic: HistorySource: NoneProgress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.Topic: MelancholySource: NoneNegation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.Topic: MelancholySource: NoneThe fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.Topic: Psychological SubjectsSource: NoneAnyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there. - The Tempation to Exist.Topic: Psychological SubjectsSource: NoneA civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.Topic: Religion / BeliefsSource: NoneNo human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.Topic: Religion / BeliefsSource: None
I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass--which is better than trying to fill them.- in the London "Guardian" [Laziness]
Famous Quotes by E.M. Cioran
• Sperm is a bandit in its pure state. More• Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become
a pessimist—a... More• When you have understood that nothing is that things do not even deserve the
status of... More• The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor
die, and whose... More• The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live—moreover, the only one.
More
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live—moreover, the only one. - E.M. Cioran Attribution: E.M. Cioran (b. 1911), Rumanian–born French philosopher. “Fractures,” Anathemas and Admirations (1986).
• History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a... More
History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable. - E.M. Cioran Attribution: E.M. Cioran (b. 1911), Romanian–born French philosopher. “Genealogy of Fanaticism,” ch. 1, A Short History of Decay (1949).
• No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors... More
• The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for... More
• Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest... More
• Afflicted with existence, each man endures like an animal the consequences which proceed from it.... More
• Those who believe in their truth—the only ones whose imprint is retained by the memory of... More
Those who believe in their truth—the only ones whose imprint is retained by the memory of men—leave the earth behind them strewn with corpses. Religions number in their ledgers more murders than the bloodiest tyrannies account for, and those whom humanity has called divine far surpass the most conscientious murderers in their thirst for slaughter. - E.M. Cioran Attribution: E.M. Cioran (b. 1911), Rumanian–born-French philosopher. “Itinerary of Hate,” ch. 1, A Short History of Decay (1949).
• One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our... More
• A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it... More
• Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more... More
• Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves. More
• Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not... More
• A sensation must have fallen very low to deign to turn into an idea. More
• Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing... More
• Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness. More• A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting
it, loses its... More• We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of
someday meeting someone... More• Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who
cannot open his mouth. More• Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment. More• You are done for—a living dead man—not when you stop loving but stop hating.
Hatred... More• What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that
man has always... More• There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be. More• Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in
company. No... More• To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten. More• The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves
as the center,... More• Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the
slightest action... More• A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed. More• Negation is the mind’s first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long
as we exert... More• Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent—unwilling either to
assimilate or to... More• We derive our vitality from our store of madness. More• A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the
uniformity of their... More
A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs—something, anything.... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla. - E.M. Cioran
Attribution: E.M. Cioran (b. 1911), Rumanian–born French philosopher. The Trouble with Being Born, ch. 11, trans. by Richard Howard, Seaver Books (1976).
• It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late. More
• Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation. More• Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
More• Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh. More• God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
More• Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need
for them and... More• If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot. More• To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring. More• Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested
in other... More
Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish. - E.M. Cioran
Attribution: E.M. Cioran (b. 1911), Romanian–born French philosopher. Title essay, The Temptation to Exist (1956).
• To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable... More
• The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself. More
E. M. CioranE. M. Cioran
Category: Philosophy
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A conscious fruit fly would have to confront exactly the same difficulties, the kind of insoluble problems as man.E.M. Cioran
All these poems where it is merely the Poem that is in question - a whole poetry with no other substance than itself! What would we say of a prayer whose object was religion?E.M. Cioran
A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of his talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.E.M. Cioran
At this precise moment, no reproach proceeding from men or gods can affect me: I have as good a conscience as if I had never existed.E.M. Cioran
...authentic poetry has nothing in common with poetry.E.M. Cioran
Beware of euphemisms! They aggravate the horror they are supposed to disguise.E.M. Cioran
Buddhism calls anger corruption of the mind, manicheism root of the tree of death. I know this, but what good does it do me to know?E.M. Cioran
Dialogue becomes pointless with someone who escapes the procession of the years. I ask those I love to be kind enough to grow old.E.M. Cioran
Each opinion, each view is necessarily partial, truncated, inadequate. In philosophy and in anything, originality comes down to incomplete definitions.E.M. Cioran
Each time Time torments me, I tell myself that one of us must back down, that it is impossible for this cruel confrontation to go on indefinitely.E.M. Cioran
E. M. CioranE. M. Cioran
Category: Philosophy
Wikipedia entry
submit picture or edit infoenter a new thought from E. M. Cioran
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Every friendship is an inconspicuous drama, a series of subtle wounds.E.M. Cioran
Having always lived in fear of being suprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.E.M. Cioran
Having enemies is a heavy responsibility. My burden is sufficient, I no longer can carry that of others as well.E.M. Cioran
He who hates himself is not humble.E.M. Cioran
How can you control yourself, master your behavior, when you come from a country where people howl at funerals?E.M. Cioran
Humanity, to rejoin the past, must invent a second naivete, without which the arts can never begin again.E.M. Cioran
I do nothing, granted. But I see hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.E.M. Cioran
If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?E.M. Cioran
If disgust for the world conferred sanctity of itself, I fail to see how I could avoid canonization.E.M. Cioran
I feel I am free but I know I am not.E.M. Cioran
Page 3 of 7
If it is characteristic of the wise man to do nothing useless, no one will surpass me in wisdom: I do not even lower myself to useful things.E.M. Cioran
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.E.M. Cioran
I have all the defects of other people and yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.E.M. Cioran
I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.E.M. Cioran
I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.E.M. Cioran
In art and in everything, the commentator is generally better informed and more lucid than the subject of commentary. This is the advantage the murderer has over his victim.E.M. Cioran
I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.E.M. Cioran
I supressed word after word from my vocabulary. When the massacre was over, only one had escaped: Solitude. I awakened euphoric.E.M. Cioran
I think of so many friends who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death.E.M. Cioran
Man accepts death but not the hour of his death. To die any time, except when one has to die!E.M. Cioran
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Never judge a man without putting yourself in his place. This old proverb makes all judgement impossible, for we judge someone only because, in fact, we cannot put ourselves in his place.E.M. Cioran
No true art without a strong dose of banality. The constant employment of the unaccustomed readily wearies us, nothing being more unendurable than the uniformity of the exceptional.E.M. Cioran
Only God has the privilege of abandoning us. Men can only drop us.E.M. Cioran
Paradise was the place where everything was known but where nothing was explained. The universe before sin - before commentary...E.M. Cioran
She meant absolutely nothing to me. Realizing, suddenly, after so many years, that whatever happens I shall never see her again, I nearly collapsed. We understand what death is only by suddenly remembering the face of someone who has been a matter of indifference to us.E.M. Cioran
Since we remember only our ordeals, it is ultimately the sick, the persecuted, the victims in every realm who will have lived to the best advantage. The others - the lucky ones - have a life, of course, but not the memory of a life.E.M. Cioran
Someone we regard highly comes closer to us when he performs an action unworthy of him - thereby he releases us from the calvary of veneration. And starting from that moment we feel an attachment to him.E.M. Cioran
The Art of Love knowing how to combine the temperament of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone.E.M. Cioran
The final step toward indifference is the destruction of the very notion of indifference.E.M. Cioran
The intrinsic value of a book does not depend on the importance of its subject (else the theologians would prevail, and mightily), but on the manner of approaching the accidental and the insignificant, of mastering the infinitesimal. The essential has never required the least talent.E.M. Cioran
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The mystics and their collected works. When one addresses oneself to God, and to God alone, as they claim to do, one should be careful not to write. God doesn't read...E.M. Cioran
The not at all negligible advantage of having greatly hated men is that one comes to endure them by the exhaustion of this very hatred.E.M. Cioran
The one sincere confession is the one we make indirectly - when we talk about other people.E.M. Cioran
There is a god at the outset, if not at the end, of every joy.E.M. Cioran
There is no false sensation.E.M. Cioran
The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them.E.M. Cioran
This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique -- and insignificant.E.M. Cioran
Time, fertile in resources, more inventive and more charitable than we think, posesses a remarkable capacity to help us out, to afford us at any hour of the day some new humiliation.E.M. Cioran
To live in expectation, to count on the future or on a simulacrum of the future: we are so accustomed to it that we have conceived the idea of immortality only out of a need to wait out eternity.E.M. Cioran
To shake people up, to wake them from their sleep, while knowing you are committing a crime and that it would be a thousand times better to leave them alone, since when they wake, too, you have nothing to offer them...E.M. Cioran
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Walking in a forest between two hedges of ferns transfigured by autumn - that is a triumph. What are ovations and applause beside it?E.M. Cioran
We do not envy those who have the capacity to pray, whereas we are filled with envy of the possessors of goods, of those who know wealth and fame. Strange that we resign ourselves to someone's salvation and not to what fugitive advantages he may enjoy.E.M. Cioran
We forgive only madmen and children for being frank with us: others, if they have the audacity to imitate them, will regret it sooner or later.E.M. Cioran
We must beware of whatever insights we have into ourselves. Our self-knowledge annoys and paralyzes our daimon - this is where we should look for the reason Socrates wrote nothing.E.M. Cioran
We should have been excused from lugging a body: the burden of the self was enough.E.M. Cioran
What a disappointment that Epicurus, the sage I most need, should have written over three hundred treatises! And what a relief that they are lost!E.M. Cioran
What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.E.M. Cioran
What is known as wisdom is ultimately only a perpetual thinking it over, i.e., non-action as first impulse.E.M. Cioran
What other people do we always feel we could do better. Unfortunately we do not have the same feeling about what we ourselves do.
E.M. Cioran
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Without the faculty of forgetting our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it.E.M. Cioran
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.E.M. Cioran
Years now without coffee, without alcohol, without tobacco. ...Luckily, there is anxiety, which usefully replaces the strongest stimulants.E.M. Cioran
What will be the physiognomy of painting, of poetry, of music, in a hundred years? No one can tell. As after the fall of Athens, of Rome, a long pause will intervene, caused by the exhaustion of consciousness itself. Humanity, to rejoin the past, must invent a second naiveté, without which the arts can never begin again.- The Trouble with Being Born
In certain men, everything, absolutely everything, derives from physiology: their body is their mind, their mind is their body.- The Trouble with Being Born
Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.- The Trouble with Being Born
To stretch out in a field, to smell the earth and tell yourself it is the end as well as the hope of our dejections, that it would be futile to search for anything better to rest on, to dissolve into. .- The Trouble with Being Born
Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.- The Trouble with Being Born
Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.- Drawn and Quartered
Man is the great deserter of being.- The Fall into Time
Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.- The New Gods
From denial to denial, his existence is diminished: vaguer and more unreal than a syllogism of sighs, how could he still be a creature of flesh and blood? Anemic, he rivals the Idea itself; he has abstracted himself from his ancestors, from his friends, from every soul and himself; in his veins, once turbulent, rests a light from another world. Liberated from what he has lived, unconcerned by what he will live; he demolishes the signposts on all his roads, and wrests himself from the dials of all time. "I shall never meet myself again," he decides, happy to turn his last hatred against himself, happier still to annihilate--in his forgiveness--all beings, all things.- A Short History of Decay
Cut off from every root, unfit, moreover to mix with dust or mud, we have achieved the feat of breaking not only with the depth of things, but their very surface.- "Civilized Man"What life is left him robs him of what reason is left him. Trifles or scourges--the passing of a fly or the cramps of the planet--horrify him equally. With his nerves on fire, he would like the Earth to be made of glass, to shatter it to smithereens; and with what thirst would fling himself toward the stars to reduce them to powder, one by one.- A Short History of Decay
If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.- Tears and Saints
The only profitable conversations are with enthusiasts who have ceased being so—with the ex-naïve…Calmed down at last, they have taken, willy-nilly, the decisive step toward knowledge— that impersonal version of disappointment.- Drawn and Quartered
As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.- Tears and Saints
What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and consent to exist.- Drawn and Quartered
My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.- The Trouble with Being Born
We smile, because no answer is conceivable, because the answer would be even more meaningless than the question.- The Trouble with Being Born
I feel I am free but I know I am not.- The Trouble with Being Born
Posted by Jan Van Biervliet at 04:32