Emil Cioran - The Temptation to Exist (1968)

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A minimum of unconsciousness is necessary if one wants to stay inside history. To act is one thing; to know one is acting is another. When lucidity invests the action, insinuates itself into it, action is undone, and with it, prejudice, whose function consists, precisely, in subordinating, in enslaving consciousness to action. The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depths. No man concerned with his equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.

Emil Cioran
Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.

Emil Cioran
We derive our vitality from our store of madness.

Emil Cioran
The wrinkles of a nation are as visible as those of an individual.

Emil Cioran
Much more than our other needs and endeavours, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with our kind: the more we practise it, the more we become like everyone else: it is in the performance of a reputedly bestial function that we prove our status as citizens: nothing is more public than the sexual act.

Emil Cioran
The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.

Emil Cioran
A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints.

Emil Cioran
Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious.

Emil Cioran
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

Emil Cioran
The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to form a reality to reality's detriment.

Emil Cioran
If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

Emil Cioran