Emil Quotes

To grant life more importance than it has is the mistake committed in sagging systems; as a consequence, no one is ready to sacrifice himself to defend them, and they collapse under the first blows perpetrated upon them. This is even more true of nations in general. Once they begin to hold life sacred, it abandons them, it ceases to be on their side. ~ Emil Cioran

Sometimes it seems to me that I am capable of absolutely nothing, but that nature through me can accomplish a great deal. ~ Emil Nolde

Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself? ~ Emil Cioran

If you love your independence, you must lend yourself, in order to protect it, to every turpitude; you must risk ignominy itself. ~ Emil M. Cioran

Rather in a gutter than on a pedestal. ~ Emil M. Cioran

When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What's your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act." And they do calm down. ~ Emil Cioran

Look neither ahead nor behind, look into yourself, with neither fear nor regret. No one descends into himself so long as he remains a slave of the past or of the future. ~ Emil M. Cioran

I'm very drawn to Eastern Europe, so I like a Hungarian writer who wrote in French called Emil Cioran; he was always good for giving me such a stir. ~ Dylan Moran

Sometimes you can feel old-sweatshirt comfortable with someone you've just met and two-left-shoes awkward with people you've known for ages. ~ Emil Sher

Sexual excitability is increased and leads to hasty engagements, marriages by the newspaper, improper love-adventures, conspicuous behavior, fondness for dress, on the other hand to jealousy and matrimonial discord. ~ Emil Kraepelin

Everyone has had, at a given moment, an extraordinary experience which will be for him, because of the memory of it he preserves, the crucial obstacle to his inner metamorphosis. ~ Emil Cioran

I was unable to walk for a whole week after that, so much did the race take out of me. But it was the most pleasant exhaustion I have ever known. ~ Emil Zatopek

It is a mistake to think of the expatriate as someone who abdicates, who withdraws and humbles himself, resigned to his miseries, his outcast state. On a closer look, he turns out to be ambitious, aggressive in his disappointments, his very acrimony qualified by his belligerence. The more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and illusions become. I even discern some relation between misfortune and megalomania. The man who has lost everything preserves as a last resort the hope of glory, or of literary scandal. He consents to abandon everything, except his name. [ . . . ]

Let us say a man writes a novel which makes him, overnight, a celebrity. In it he recounts his sufferings. His compatriots in exile envy him: they too have suffered, perhaps more. And the man without a country becomes - or aspires to become - a novelist. The consequence: an accumulation of confusions, an inflation of horrors, of frissons that date. One cannot keep renewing Hell, whose very characteristic is monotony, or the face of exile either. Nothing in literature exasperates a reader so much as The Terrible; in life, it too is tainted with the obvious to rouse our interest. But our author persists; for the time being he buries his novel in a drawer and awaits his hour. The illusion of surprise, of a renown which eludes his grasp but on which he reckons, sustains him; he lives on unreality. Such, however, is the power of this illusion that if, for instance, he works in some factor ~ Emil M. Cioran

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. ~ Emil M. Cioran

The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion ... one would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it. ~ Emil Cioran

Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again. ~ Emil Cioran

Today we are inundated with such an immense flood of printed matter that the value of individual work has depreciated, for our harassed contemporaries simply cannot take everything that is printed today. It is the typographer's task to divide up and organize and interpret this mass of printed matter in such a way that the reader will have a good chance of finding what is of interest to him. ~ Emil Ruder

If we understand many more things than other people, we owe it to our nervous system which is far more disturbed. One says 'I'm sad' but no one realizes what is the cause of his/her sadness; it may come from the stomach; or from a tune we have just listened to and which failed to impress us on the spot; or it may come from frustrated sexual desire ... It is not easy to see beyond symbolic forms of expression. People don't realize that you can negate the progress of humanity because your feet hurt. It is important to see beyond that which is given; and yet, once you see it, nothing matters. ~ Emil Cioran

Man has been evolved and created the gods. Evolved more and decided to destroy all of them. ~ Emil A. Zafirov

I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen
and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other ... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies. ~ Emil Cioran

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 ~ Emil Cioran

I was walking late one night along a tree-lined path; a chestnut fell at my feet. The noise it made as it burst, the resonance it provoked in me, and an upheaval out of all proportion to this insignificant event thrust me into miracle, into the rapture of the definitive, as if there were no more questions - only answers. I was drunk on a thousand unexpected discoveries, none of which I could make use of. ...
This is how I nearly reached the Supreme. But instead I went on with my walk. ~ Emil Cioran

Ambition is a drug that turns it's addicts into potential madmen. ~ Emil 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. ~ Emil Cioran

An athlete cannot run with money in his pockets. He must run with hope in his heart and dreams in his head. ~ Emil Zatopek

When modes of expression are worn out, art tends toward non-sense, toward a private and incomprehensible universe. An intelligible shudder, whether in painting, in music, or in poetry, strikes us, and rightly, as vulgar or out-of-date. The public will soon disappear; art will follow shortly.

A civilization which began with the cathedrals has to end with the hermeticism of schizophrenia. ~ Emil 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. ~ Emil Cioran

We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job ... ~ Emil Cioran

It is not necessary to smile and make a wonderful impression on the judges. ~ Emil Zatopek

To what temptations, to what extremities does lucidity lead! Shall we desert it now to take refuge in unconsciousness? Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher the poet's equal there. But our perspicacity cannot bear that such a marvel should endure, nor that inspiration should be brought within everyone's grasp; daylight strips us of the night's gifts. Only the madman enjoys the privilege of passing smoothly from a nocturnal to a daylight existence: no distinction between his dreams and his waking. He has renounced our reason, as the beggar has renounced our belongings. Both have found a way that leads beyond suffering and solved all our problems; hence they remain examples we cannot follow, saviors without adepts. ~ Emil Cioran

No one has lived so close to his skeleton as I have lived to mine: from which results an endless dialogue and certain truths which I manage neither to accept nor to reject. ~ Emil M. Cioran

Deep inside, each man feels - and believes - himself to be immortal, even if he knows he will perish the next moment. We can understand everything, admit everything, realize everything, except our death, even when we ponder it unremittingly and even when we are resigned to it. ~ Emil M. Cioran

The Romans were not wiped out by the invasions of the barbarians, nor by the Christian virus, but by a more subtle evil, boredom. ~ Emil M. Cioran

Did you have a good nap?" Emil asked.
"Yeah, I guess I was tired. I need to practice resting when I go on vacations instead of getting stressed out."
"Why are you stressed?" Emil Asked, perplexed. This question confirmed it for me, guys really are idiots. ~ Angela Corbett

I am opposed to textbooks ... I find it hateful to give a course where I have to plough my way through chapter after chapter of a given book. The liveliness of the lecture, which is meant to give an impetus to the sudents, would suffer tremendously. ~ Emil Artin

Pictures are spiritual beings. The soul of the painter lives within them. ~ Emil Nolde

It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: In truth it is itself the quintessence of injustice. ~ Emil Cioran

The dead center of existence: when it is all the same to you whether you read a newspaper article or think about God. ~ Emil Cioran

Impartiality is incompatible with the will to affirm oneself or quite simply with the will to exist. To acknowledge another's merits is an alarming symptom, an act against nature. ~ Emil Cioran

She fought him by reminding herself what her father had said to Emil Hesping - that they lived in a country where believing had taken the place of knowing. ~ Ursula Hegi

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. ~ Emil Cioran

If I reflect on any moment of my life, the most feverish or the most neutral, what remains? - and what difference is there now between them? Everything having become the same, without relief and without reality, it is when I felt nothing that I was closest to the truth, I mean to my present state in which I am recapitulating my experiences. What is the use of having felt anything at all? There is no "ecstasy" which either memory or imagination can resuscitate! ~ Emil M. Cioran

Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions. ~ Emil Cioran

A remark of my brother's apropos of the troubles and pains our mother endured: "Old age is nature's self-criticism. ~ Emil M. Cioran

Were we in the habit of looking beyond the specific content of ideologies and doctrines, we should see that to claim kinship with one of them rather than some other does not at all imply much expenditure of sagacity. Those following one party imagine they differ from those following another, whereas all, once they choose, join each other underneath, participate in one and the same nature, and vary only in appearance, by the mask they assume. ~ Emil M. Cioran

After each night we are emptier: our mysteries and our griefs have leaked away into our dreams. Thus sleep's labor not only diminishes the power of our thought, but even that of our secrets. ~ Emil Cioran

Emil on top of me, his breath heavy on my neck. As our eyes met and held, the playfulness turned into something else entirely, something with a lot more heat. Emil leaned in, barely brushing his lips against my own he whispered, "We were good at this then too."
As his soft lips met mine, my entire body felt molten - liquid and hot, moving seamlessly with his. ~ Angela Corbett

Every 'I' begins with a crack and a revelation. ~ Emil M. Cioran

If man is not ready to abdicate or to reconsider his case, it is because he has not yet drawn the final consequences of knowledge and of power. Convinced that his moment will come, that he will catch up with God and pass Him by, he clings - envious as he is - to the notion of evolution, as if the fact of advancing must necessarily bring him to the highest degree of perfection. Having sought to be other, he will end by being nothing; he is already nothing. Doubtless he is evolving, but against himself, to his cost, and toward a complexity which is ruining him. Becoming, progress: notions apparently tangential, actually divergent. True, everything changes, but rarely, if ever, for the better. Euphoric inflection of the original disease, of that false innocence which awakened in Adam a desire for the new, our faith in evolution, in the identity of becoming and progress, will collapse only when man, having reached the extremity of his distraction, having turned at last to the knowledge which leads to deliverance and not to power, will be in a position to offer an irrevocable no to his exploits and to his work. If he continues to clutch at them, he will doubtless enter upon the career of a ludicrous god or an obsolete animal, a solution as convenient as it is degrading, the ultimate stage of his infidelity to himself. Whatever choice he makes, and though he has not exhausted all the virtues of his failure, he has nonetheless fallen so low that it is hard to understand why he does ~ Emil M. Cioran

Freedom is the right to difference; being plurality, it postulates the dispersion of the absolute, its resolution into a dust of truths, equally justified and provisional. There is an underlying polytheism in liberal democracy (call it an unconscious polytheism); conversely, every authoritarian regime partakes of a disguised monotheism. ~ Emil Cioran

It's impossible that the improbable will never happen. ~ Emil Julius Gumbel

The mission of Everyman is to fulfill the lies he incarnates, to succeed in being no more than an exhaust illusion. ~ Emil M. Cioran

Emil stood on the other side, bags under his
eyes, his hair disheveled. I'd never seen him look so
unkempt. He actually seemed depressed. I motioned
for him to come in. When he did, I shut the door and
he followed me to the couches. ~ Angela Corbett

I don't blame Germans," Emil said. "I don't even blame Nazis. I blame people who want to live at the expense of others. ~ Steve Anderson

Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do. One so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it. ~ Emil Cioran

The Revelation of God is not a book or a doctrine, but a living Person. ~ Emil Brunner

The fatigue I've gathered year after year and stored inside now heaves a muted cry of helplessness. Nothing but fatigue, rounding my shoulders, heavier than ever on this late autumn day with a useless sun, a world of unforgiving disasters. So many struggles and tragedies, so much sorrow and egotism in this dark, in this rotting century of hate. ~ Emil Dorian

Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that he alone pursues the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear. ~ Emil M. Cioran

Existence = Torment. The equation seems obvious to me, but not to one of my friends. How to convince him? I cannot lend him my sensations; yet only they would have the power to persuade him, to give him that additional dose of ill-being he has so insistently asked for all this time. ~ Emil M. Cioran

All important things in art have always originated from the deepest feeling about the mystery of Being. ~ Emil Nolde

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

A philosopher is saved from mediocrity only by skepticism or mystique, these two forms of despair in the front of knowledge. Mystique is an escape from knowledge, and skepticism is knowledge without hope. In both kinds world is not a solution. ~ Emil M. Cioran

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. ~ Emil M. Cioran

We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone 'happy', no greater flattery than to grant him a 'vein of melancholy' ... This is because gaiety is link to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone. ~ Emil Cioran

Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy. ~ Emil Cioran

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. ~ Emil Cioran

Officers don't run, only corporals do that ~ Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim

Born weary of being born, he chose to be a shade; when, then, did he live, and by the transgression of what birth? And if, living, he wore his shroud, by what miracle did he manage to die? ~ Emil M. Cioran

I saw his eyes. They were like silver. Grey maybe? Steel blue? No, they were silver. Even from this distance I could see right through them. ~ Aquene Emil

The more power man acquires, the more vulnerable he becomes. What he must fear most is the moment when, creation entirely fleeced, he will celebrate his triumph, that fatal apotheosis, the victory he will not survive. ~ Emil Cioran

We had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy. ~ Emil Cioran

Tolerance cannot seduce the young. ~ Emil M. Cioran

The tired intellectual sums up the deformities and the vices of a world adrift. He does not act, he suffers; if he favors the notion of tolerance, he does not find in it the stimulant he needs. Tyranny furnishes that, as do the doctrines of which it is the outcome. If he is the first of its victims, he will not complain: only the strength that grinds him into the dust seduces him. To want to be free is to want to be oneself; but he is tired of being himself, of blazing a trail into uncertainty, of stumbling through truths. "Bind me with the chains of Illusion," he sighs, even as he says farewell to the peregrinations of Knowledge. Thus he will fling himself, eyes closed, into any mythology which will assure him the protection and the peace of the yoke. Declining the honor of assuming his own anxieties, he will engage in enterprises from which he anticipates sensations he could not derive from himself, so that the excesses of his lassitude will confirm the tyrannies. Churches, ideologies, police - seek out their origin in the horror he feels for his own lucidity, rather than in the stupidity of the masses. This weakling transforms himself, in the name of a know-nothing utopia, into a gravedigger of the intellect; convinced of doing something useful, he prostitutes Pascal's old "abêtissezvous," the Solitary's tragic device.
A routed iconoclast, disillusioned with paradox and provocation, in search of impersonality and routine, half prostrated, ripe for the stereotype, the ~ Emil M. Cioran

If we consider closely our so-called generous actions, there is none which, from some aspect, is not blameworthy an even harmful, so that we come to regret having performed it - so that we must choose, finally, between abstention and remorse. ~ Emil Cioran

What an artist learns matters little. What he himself discovers has a real worth for him, and gives him the necessary incitement to work. ~ Emil Nolde

There is not, and never was, a greater man than Emil Zatopek. ~ Ron Clarke

I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison. ~ Emil Cioran

In the early 1950s, during the near avalanche of discoveries, rediscoveries, and redefinitions of subcellular components made possible by electron microscopy, those prospecting in this newly opened field were faced with the problem of what to do with their newly acquired wealth. ~ George Emil Palade

Even when they desert hell, men do so only to reconstruct it elsewhere. ~ Emil Cioran

I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions. ~ Emil Cioran

I long to be free - desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free. ~ Emil Cioran

Nothing more to pursue, except the pursuit of nothing. ~ Emil Cioran

As an artist I am attracted by decadence, by those who exhaust their lives in the shallow pursuits of pleasure. Occasionally, I feel that spiritually I participate in all these kinds of lives. ~ Emil Nolde

We do not adopt a belief because it is true (they are all true), but because some obscure power impels us to do so. When this power leaves us, we suffer prostration and collapse, a tete-a-tete with what is left of ourselves. ~ Emil Cioran

My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out. I am a fossil dating from the beginning of the world: not all of its elements have completely crystallized, and initial chaos still shows through. I am absolute contradiction, climax of antinomies, the last limit of tension; in me anything is possible, for I am he who at the supreme moment, in front of absolute nothingness, will laugh. ~ Emil Cioran

For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened. ...
No sooner are they open than the drama beings. To look without understanding - that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much. ... ~ Emil Cioran

Truth remains hidden to the man filled with desire and hatred" (Buddha)…. Which is to say, to every man alive. ~ Emil M. Cioran

When we find her, I'm still going to fight for her.-Emil- ~ Angela Corbett

Though we may prefer ourselves to the universe, we nonetheless loathe ourselves much more than we suspect. If the wise man is so rare a phenomenon, it is because he seems unshaken by the aversion which, like all beings, he must feel for himself. ~ Emil Cioran

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. ~ Emil Cioran

There is no limit-disappointment. ~ Emil M. Cioran

His sterility was infinite: it partook of ecstasy. ~ Emil Cioran

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot. ~ Emil Cioran

Nothing desiccates a mind so much as its repugnance to conceive obscure ideas. ~ Emil Cioran

Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death? ~ Emil Cioran

Meditate but one hour upon the self's nonexistence and you will feel yourself to be another man, said a priest of the Japanese Kusha sect to a Western visitor.
Without having frequented the Buddhist monasteries, how many times have I not lingered over the world's unreality, and hence my own? I have not become another man for that, no, but there certainly has remained with me the feeling that my identity is entirely illusory, and that by losing it I have lost nothing, except something, except everything. ~ Emil Cioran

I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside. ~ Emil Cioran

Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world. ~ Emil Cioran

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. ~ Emil Cioran

Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend. ~ Emil Cioran