Emil Cioran - A Short History of Decay (1975)

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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
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
What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name — and moving on.

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

Emil Cioran
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

Emil Cioran
You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness.

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

Emil Cioran
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

Emil Cioran
But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle...

Emil Cioran
History shows that the thinkers who mounted on the top of the ladder of questions, who set their foot on the last rung, that of the absurd, have bequesthed to posterity only an example of sterility.

Emil Cioran
This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears.

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
No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

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

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

Emil Cioran
The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.

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

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

Emil Cioran