Emil Cioran - Tears and Saints (1995)

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

Emil Cioran
To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing

Emil Cioran
As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.

Emil Cioran
Life is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it.

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
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
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
Music is the sound track of askesis. Could one make love after Bach? Not even after Handel, whose unearthliness does not have heavenly perfume. Music is a tomb of delights, beatitude which buries us.

Emil Cioran
Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don't know, and we don't really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.

Emil Cioran
The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness.

Emil Cioran
Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.

Emil Cioran
Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world.

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
Read day and night, devour books—these sleeping pills—not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.

Emil Cioran
Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.

Emil Cioran
Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are.

Emil Cioran
Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion.

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
…all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint.

Emil Cioran
There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.

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
To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze.

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
Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?

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

Emil Cioran
As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.

Emil Cioran
A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.

Emil Cioran
Love of the absolute engenders a predilection for self-destruction. Hence the passion for monasteries and brothels. Cells and women, in both cases. Weariness with life fares well in the shadow of whores and saintly women.

Emil Cioran
Heroes abound at the dawn of civilizations, during pre-Homeric and Gothic epochs, when people, not having yet experienced spiritual torture, satisfy their thirst for renunciation through a derivative: heroism.

Emil Cioran