Gilels Emil Quotes

Only normal that man should no longer be interested in religion but in religions, for only through them will he be in a position to understand the many versions of his spiritual collapse. ~ Emil M. Cioran

Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself. ~ Emil Cioran

The terrifying experience and obsession of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of yourself. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness. ~ Emil M. Cioran

However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness, and caprice. ~ Emil Cioran

Maria raised herself with difficulty. "Hush. I'm getting up. See?" She sat perched on the edge of the bed, breathing heavily. "And you will have my porridge thus morning. If you share it with Emil. ~ Lena Coakley

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 An intelligible shudder, whether in painting, in music, or in poetry, strikes us, and rightly, as vulgar or out-of-date.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

It is our discomforts which provoke, which create consciousness; their task accomplished, they weaken and disappear one after the other. Consciousness however remains and survives them, without recalling what it owes to them, without even ever having known. Hence it continually proclaims its autonomy, its sovereignty, even when it loathes itself and would do away with itself. ~ Emil Cioran

If you try to convert someone, it will never be to
effect his salvation but to make him suffer like yourself,
to be sure he is exposed to the same ordeals and
endures them with the same impatience. You keep
watch, you pray, you agonize-provided he does too,
sighing, groaning, beset by the same tortures that are
racking you. Intolerance is the work of ravaged souls
whose faith comes down to a more or less deliberate
torment they would like to see generalized, instituted.
The happiness of others never having been a motive
or principle of action, it is invoked only to appease
conscience or to parade noble excuses: whenever we
determine upon an action, the impulse leading to it
and forcing us to complete it is almost always inadmissible.
No one saves anyone; for we save only ourselves,
and do so all the better if we disguise as
convictions the misery we want to share, to lavish on
others. However glamorous its appearances, proselytism
nonetheless derives from a suspect generosity,
worse in its effects than a patent aggression. No one
is willing to endure alone the discipline he may even
have assented to, nor the yoke he has shouldered.
Vindication reverberates beneath the missionary's
bonhomie, the apostle's joy. We convert not to liberate
but to enchain.
Once someone is shackled by a certainty, he envies
your vague opinions, your resistance to dogmas ~ Emil M. Cioran

Naive enough to set off in pursuit of Truth, I had explored - to no avail - any number of disciplines. I was beginning to be confirmed in my skepticism when the notion occurred to me of consulting, as a last result, Poetry: who knows? perhaps it would be profitable, perhaps it conceals beneath its arbitrary appearances some definitive revelation ... Illusory recourse! Poetry had outstripped be in negation and cost me even my uncertainties ... ~ Emil Cioran

Only those are happy who never think or, rather, who only think about life's bare necessities, and to think about such things means not to think at all. True thinking resembles a demon who muddies the spring of life or a sickness which corrupts its roots. To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life, to leave behind you, as symbols of your life's drama, a trail of smoke and blood - all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you. ~ Emil Cioran

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die? ~ Emil Cioran

All that is Life in me urges me to give up God. ~ Emil M. Cioran

A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession. ~ Emil Cioran

The moments of refinement conceal a death-principle: nothing is more fragile than subtlety. The abuse of it leads to the catechisms, an end to dialectical games, the collapse of an intellect which instinct no longer assists. The ancient philosophy, trapped in its scruples, had in spite of itself opened the way to the artlessness of the lower depths; religious sects pullulated; the schools gave way to the cults. An analogous defeat threatens us: already the ideologies are rampant, the degraded mythologies which will reduce and annihilate us. We shall not be able to sustain the ceremony of our contradictions much longer. Many are prepared to venerate any idol, to serve any truth, so long as one and the other be imposed upon them, so long as they need not make the effort to choose their shame or their disaster.
Whatever the world to come, the Western peoples will play in it the part of the Graeculi in the Roman Empire. Sought out and despised by the new conqueror, they will have, in order to impress him, only the jugglery of their intelligence or the luster of their past. The art of surviving oneself - they are already distinguished in that. Symptoms of exhaustion are everywhere: Germany has given her measure in music: what leads us to believe that she will excel in it again? She has used up the resources of her profundity, as France those of her elegance. Both - and with them, this entire corner of the world - are on the verge of bankruptcy, the most glamorous since antiq ~ Emil M. Cioran

-To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously. ~ Emil Cioran

Only god has the privilege of abandoning us. Men can only drop us ~ Emil M. Cioran

The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity ... ~ Emil Cioran

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. ~ Emil Cioran

I feel that I am dying of solitude, of
love, of despair, of hatred, of all that this world offers me. (...) Life breeds both plenitude and void, exuberance and depression. What are we when confronted
with the interior vortex which swallows us into absurdity? ~ Emil M. Cioran

I think of so many people 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. ~ 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

Some of Mozart's Andantes emanate an ethereal desolation, a sort of dream funeral in another life. ~ Emil Cioran

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

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous. ~ Emil Cioran

Emil was already familiar with those people who always say, "Goodness, everything was better in the old days." And he no longer listened when people told him that in the old days the air was cleaner or that cows had bigger heads. Because it usually wasn't true. Those people simply wanted to be dissatisfied, because otherwise they would have to be satisfied. ~ Erich Kastner

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

Art is exalted above religion and race. Not a single solitary soul these days believes in the religions of the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Greeks ... Only their art, whenever it was beautiful, stands proud and exalted, rising above all time. ~ Emil Nolde

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

I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece. ~ Emil Cioran

Once I had a "self"; now I am no more than an object. ~ Emil M. Cioran

To accomplish nothing and die of the strain ~ Emil Cioran