Emil Cioran - God Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

View all Emil Cioran Quotes
Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.

Emil Cioran
At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j'ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.

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
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.

Emil Cioran
The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.

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

Emil Cioran
God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.

Emil Cioran
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.

Emil Cioran
Only what has been conceived in solitude, face to face with God, endures — whether one is a believer or not.

Emil Cioran
Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation.

Emil Cioran
A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.

Emil Cioran
Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.

Emil Cioran
If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.

Emil Cioran
Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again.

Emil Cioran
This world was created from God's fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator. Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we live dramas for the boredom of a spectator, whose claps have never reached the ears of a mortal.

Emil Cioran
God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.

Emil Cioran
The initial revelation of any monastery: everything is nothing. Thus begin all mysticisms. It is less than one step from nothing to God, for God is the positive expression of nothingness.

Emil Cioran
There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.

Emil Cioran
If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.

Emil Cioran
Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.

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

Emil Cioran
From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.

Emil Cioran
I don't understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.

Emil Cioran
We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

Emil Cioran
Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.

Emil Cioran