Emil Cioran - A Short History of Decay (1975)

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

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

Emil Cioran
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

Emil Cioran
To repeat to yourself a thousand times a day: 'Nothing on Earth has any worth,' to keep finding yourself at the same point, to circle stupidly as a top, eternally...

Emil Cioran
We replace God as best we can; for every god is good, provided he perpetuates in eternity our desire for a crucial solitude...

Emil Cioran
Nothing surpasses the pleasures of idleness: even if the end of the world were to come, I would not leave my bed at an ungodly hour.

Emil Cioran
Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?

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

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
Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

Emil Cioran
Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

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

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

Emil Cioran
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

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

Emil Cioran
If our fellow men could be aware of our opinions about them, love, friendship, and devotion would be forever erased from the dictionaries; and if we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an "I" without shame.

Emil Cioran
Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?

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

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

Emil Cioran
Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

Emil Cioran
Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.

Emil Cioran
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

Emil Cioran
I dream of wanting - and all I want seems to me worthless.

Emil Cioran
Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.

Emil Cioran
As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad.

Emil Cioran
It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other.

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
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