Emile M. Cioran Quotes - Page 11

A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice.

Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world.

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.

Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.

To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer. As soon as they consent to live, the unbeliever and the man of faith are fundamentally the same, since both have made the only decision that defines a being.

A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime.

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.

We change ideas like neckties.

The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty-the sideshow of second thoughts-is his rule; he offers himself.

Man started out on the wrong foot. The misadventure in paradise was the first consequence. The rest had to follow.

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.

We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.

To Foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by the hatred smothered within.

On Creating — What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures.

Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.

We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.

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

There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.

Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.