Emil Cioran - Action Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

View all Emil Cioran Quotes
It is difficult, it is impossible to believe that the Good Lord— Our Father —had a hand in the scandal of creation. Everything suggests that He took no part in it, that it proceeds from a god without scruples, a feculent god. Goodness does not create, lacking imagination; it takes imagination to put together a world, however botched. At the very least, there must be a mixture of good and evil in order to produce an action or a work.

Emil Cioran
I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide.

Emil Cioran
A minimum of unconsciousness is necessary if one wants to stay inside history. To act is one thing; to know one is acting is another. When lucidity invests the action, insinuates itself into it, action is undone, and with it, prejudice, whose function consists, precisely, in subordinating, in enslaving consciousness to action. The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depths. No man concerned with his equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.

Emil Cioran
No one has the audacity to exclaim: I don't want to do anything! —we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions.

Emil Cioran
If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.

Emil Cioran
I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action - mother of all vices - I am the cause of no one's suffering.

Emil Cioran
We regret not having the courage to make such and such decision; we regret much more having made one - any one. Better no action than the consequences of an action.

Emil Cioran
When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment's thought to the "meaning" of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.

Emil Cioran
The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to form a reality to reality's detriment.

Emil Cioran
Even in childhood I watched the hours flow, independent of any reference, any action, any event, the disjunction of time from what was not itself, its autonomous existence, its special status, its empire, its tyranny. I remember quite clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts. Time was coming unstuck from being—at my expense.

Emil Cioran
By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?

Emil Cioran
I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.

Emil Cioran