Emil Cioran Quotes

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.

The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It's not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.

The advantage of meditating upon life and death is being able to say anything at all about them.

The mind advances only when it has the patience to go in circles, in other words, to deepen.

When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.

To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!

Why don't I kill myself? If I knew exactly what keeps me from doing so, I should have no more questions to ask myself since I should have answered them all.

How can you know if you are in the truth? The criterion is simple enough: if others make a vacuum around you, there is not a doubt in the world that you are closer to the essential than they are.

A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people.

What place do we occupy in the "universe"? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we are evidently so insignificant? Once we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.

As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.

I dream of wanting — and all I want seems to me worthless.

To tell the truth, I couldn't care less about the relativity of knowledge, simply because the world does not deserve to be known.

When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years.

The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it.