Emil Cioran - A Short History of Decay (1975)

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Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

Emil Cioran
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.

Emil Cioran
Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.

Emil Cioran
Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.

Emil Cioran
Life inspires more dread than death — it is life which is the great unknown.

Emil Cioran
Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.

Emil Cioran
The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue.

Emil Cioran
At different degrees, everything is pathology, except for indifference.

Emil Cioran
Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

Emil Cioran
I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.

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
To Live signifies to believe and hope — to lie and to lie to oneself.

Emil Cioran
We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.

Emil Cioran
Nothing is indefensible - from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime.

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
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

Emil Cioran
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.

Emil Cioran
So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.

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
Vague a l'ame — melancholy yearning for the end of the world.

Emil Cioran
When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

Emil Cioran
Truths begin by a conflict with the police — and end by calling them in.

Emil Cioran
Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun.

Emil Cioran
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
We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

Emil Cioran