Ruly Emil Quotes

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

I have recommended you the dignity of skepticism: yet here I am, prowling around the Absolute. Technique of contradiction? Remember, rather, what Flaubert said: "I am a mystic and I believe in nothing". ~ Emil Cioran

Between the demand to be clear,and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect. ~ Emil Cioran

Here are experiences which one cannot survive, after which one feels that there is no meaning left in anything. Once you have reached the limits of life, having lived to extremity all that is offered at those dangerous borders, the everyday gesture and the usual aspiration lose their seductive charm. If you go on living, you do so only through your capacity for objectification, your ability to free yourself, in writing, from the infinite strain. Creativity is a temporary salvation from the claws of death ~ Emil Cioran

I can be either a good friend or a good Nazi, Emil thought. He knew now that he couldn't be both. ~ Lee Strauss

The artist need not know very much; best of all let him work instinctively and paint as naturally as he breathes or walks. ~ Emil Nolde

Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time. ~ Emil Cioran

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification. ~ Emil Cioran

The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release. ~ Emil Cioran

There cannot be creation without a lot of energy. ~ Emil Nolde

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

A conscious fruit fly would have to confront exactly the same difficulties, the same kind of insoluble problems as man. ~ Emil Cioran

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

To live in any true sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must be able to renounce, to do oneself violence, to act against one's own nature, to weaken oneself; we conceive freedom only for ourselves - we extend it to our neighbours only at the cost of exhausting efforts; whence the precariousness of liberalism, a defiance of our instincts, a brief and miraculous success, a state of exception, at the antipodes of our deepest imperatives. ~ Emil Cioran

Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don't know, and we don't really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless. ~ Emil Cioran

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. ~ Emil Cioran

The satisfaction we take from performing a task (especially when we have no belief in the task and even disdain it) shows to what degree we still belong to the rabble. ~ Emil M. Cioran

What they ask you for is actions, proofs, works, and all you can produce are transformed tears. ~ Emil Cioran

The idle apprehend more things, are deeper than the industrious: no task limits their horizon; born into an eternal Sunday, they watch- - and watch themselves watching. Sloth is a somatic skepticism, the way the flesh doubts. In a world of inaction, the idle would be the only ones not to be murderers. But they do not belong to humanity, and, sweat not being their strong point, they live without suffering the consequences of Life and of Sin. Doing neither good nor evil, they disdain - spectators of the human convulsion - the weeks of time, the efforts which asphyxiate consciousness. What would they have to fear from a limitless extension of certain afternoons except the regret of having supported a crudely elementary obviousness? Then, exasperation in the truth might induce them to imitate the others and to indulge in the degrading temptation of tasks. This is the danger which threatens sloth, that miraculous residue of paradise. ~ Emil Cioran

His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse. ~ Emil Cioran

I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness. ~ Emil Cioran

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

Every phenomenon is a corrupt version of another, larger
phenomenon: time, a disease of eternity; history, a disease of
time; life, again, a disease of matter.
Then what is normal, what is healthy? Eternity? Which itself
is only an infirmity of God. ~ Emil Cioran

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

Only at the cross of Christ does man see fully what it is that separates him from God; yet it is here alone that he perceives that he is no longer separated from God. Nowehere else does the inviolable holiness of God, the impossibility of overlooking the guilt of man stand out more plainly; but nowhere else does the limitless mercy of God, which utterly transcends all human standards, stand out more clearly and plainly. ~ Emil Brunner

To have opinions is inevitable, is natural; to have convictions is less so. Each time I meet someone who has convictions, I wonder what intellectual vice, what flaw has caused him to acquire such a thing. However legitimate this question, my habit of raising it spoils the pleasure of conversation for me, gives me a bad conscience, makes me hateful in my own eyes. ~ Emil M. Cioran

History: a context in which the capital letters decompose, and with them, the men who imagine and cherish them. ~ Emil M. Cioran

What are the occupations of the sage? He resigns himself to seeing, to eating, etc…., he accepts in spite of himself this "wound with nine openings," which is what the Bhagavad-Gita calls the body.―Wisdom? To undergo with dignity the humiliation inflicted upon us by our holes. ~ Emil M. Cioran

The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived. ~ Emil M. Cioran

Enlightened despotism: the only regime that can attract a disabused mind, one incapable of being the accomplice of revolutions since it is not even the accomplice of history. ~ 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

A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself. ~ Emil Cioran

God does not read. ~ Emil M. Cioran

In Buddhist writings, mention is often made of "the abyss of birth." An abyss indeed, a gulf into which we do not fall but from which, instead, we emerge, to our universal chagrin. ~ Emil Cioran

Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what's the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say? ~ Emil Cioran

I was not talented enough to run and smile at the same time ~ Emil Zatopek

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

There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such. ~ Emil Cioran

If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason. ~ Emil 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

Despair is the state in which anxiety and restlessness are immanent to existence. Nobody in despair suffers from "problems", but from his own inner torment and fire. It's a pity that nothing can be solved in this world. Yet there never was and here never will be anyone who would commit suicide for this reason. So much for the power that intellectual anxiety has over the total anxiety of our being! That is why I prefer the dramatic life, consumed by inner fires and tortured by destiny, to the intellectual, caught up in abstractions which do not engage the essence of our subjectivity. I despise the absence of risks, madness and passion in abstract thinking. How fertile live, passionate thinking is! Lyricism feeds it like blood pumped into the heart! ~ Emil M. Cioran

There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books. ~ Emil M. Cioran

If attachment is an evil, we must look for its cause in the scandal of birth, for to be born is to be attached. Detachment then should apply itself to getting rid of the traces of this scandal, the most serious and intolerable. ~ Emil Cioran

You can't just go and ask people the questions that matter most
that would be too easy. ~ Emil Ostrovski

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

Hope is the positive mode of awaiting the future. ~ Emil Brunner

Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him. ~ Emil M. Cioran