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Emil M. Cioran Quotes

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Famous Emil M. Cioran Quotes

“Plus je lis les pessimistes, plus j'aime la vie. Après une lecture de Schopenhauer, je réagis comme un fiancé. Schopenhauer a raison de prétendre que la vie n'est qu'un rêve. Mais il commet une inconséquence grave quand, au lieu d'encourager les illusions, il les démasque en laissant croire qu'il existerait quelque chose en dehors d'elles. Qui pourrait supporter la vie, si elle était réelle? Rêve, elle est un mélange de charme et de terreur auquel nous succombons.”

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Book:Oeuvres
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“Je suis de plus en plus certain que l'homme est un animal malheureux, abandonné dans le monde, condamné à se trouver une modalité de vie propre, telle que la nature n'en a jamais connu. Sa prétendue liberté le fait souffrir plus que n'importe quell forme de vie captive dans la nature. Rien d'étonnant, par conséquent, à ce que l'homme en arrive parfois à être jaloux d'une plante, d'une fleure. [...] Seule cette échappée cosmique, vécue suivant l'arabesque des formes vitales et le pittoresque des plants, saurait réveiller en moi l'envie de redevenir homme. Car si la différence de l'animal à l'homme consiste en ceci, que le premier ne saurait être autre chose qu'animal, tandis que l'homme peut être non-homme, c'est-à-dire autre chose que lui-même - eh bien, je suis un non-homme.”

AnimalHommeSur Les Cimes Du DésespoirNe Plus êTre HommeNon Homme
Book:Oeuvres
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“Filming a scene, there are countless takes of the same incident. Someone watching in the street - obviously a provincial - can't get over it: 'After this, I'll never go to the movies again.' One might react similarly with regard to anything whose underside one has seen, whose secret has been seized. Yet, by an obnubilation which has something of the miraculous about it, there are gynecologists who are attracted to their patients, gravediggers who father children, incurables who lay plans, skeptics who write . . .”

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Book:The Trouble with Being Born
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“Prefer de o mie de ori o existenţă dramatică, torturată pentru destinul ei în lume şi chinuită de cele mai consumatoare flăcări interioare, decât un om abstract, frământat de probleme abstracte care nu angajează fondul subiectivităţii noastre. Dispreţuiesc în această gândire absenţa riscului, a nebuniei şi a pasiunii. Cât de fecundă este o gândire vie, pasionată, în care lirismul circulă ca sângele în vine!”

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Book:On the Heights of Despair
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“### Pauvreté de la sagesse Je hais les sages pour leur complaisance, leur lâcheté et leur reserve. J'aime infiniment plus les passions dévorantes que l'humeur égale qui rend insensible au plaisir comme à la douleur. Le sage ignore le tragique de la passion et la peur de la mort, de même qu'il méconnait l'élan et le risque, l'héroisme barbare, grotesque ou sublime. Il s'exprime en maximes et donne des conseils. Le sage ne vit rien, ne ressent rien, il ne désire ni n'attend. Il se plaît à niveler les divers contenus de la vie, et en assume toutes les conséquences. Bien plus complexes me semblent ceux qui, malgré ce nivellement, ne cessent pourtant de se tourmenter. L'existence du sage est vide et stérile, car dépourvue d'antinomies et de désespoir. Mais les existences que dévorent des contradictions insurmontables sont infiniment plus fécondes. La résignation du sage surgit du vide. et non du feu intérieur. J'aimerais mille fois mieux mourir de ce feu que du vide et de la résignation.”

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Book:Oeuvres
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“Archaic societies have lasted so long because they know nothing of the desire to innovate, to grovel before ever-new simulacra. If you change images with each generation, you cannot anticipate historical longevity. Classical Greece and modern Europe typify civilisations stricken by a precocious death, following a greed for metamorphosis and an excessive consumption of gods, and of the surrogates for gods. Ancient China and Egypt wallowed for millennia in a magnificent sclerosis. As did African societies, before contact with the West. They too are threatened, because they have adopted another rhythm. Having lost the monopoly on stagnation, they grow increasingly frantic and will inevitably topple like their models, like those feverish civilisations incapable of lasting more than a dozen centuries. In the future, the peoples who accede to hegemony will enjoy it even less: history in slow motion has inexorably been replaced by history out of breath. Who can help regretting the pharaohs and their Chinese colleagues? Institutions, societies, civilisations differ in duration and significance, yet all are subject to one and the same law, which decrees that the invincible impulse, the factor of their rise, must sag and settle after a certain time, this decadence corresponding to a slackening of that energiser which is . . . delirium. Compared with periods of expansion, of dementia really, those of decline seem sane and are so, are too much so—which makes them almost as deadly as the others. A nation that has fulfilled itself, that has expended its talents and exploited the last resources of its genius, expiates such success by producing nothing thereafter. It has done its duty, it aspires to vegetate, but to its cost it will not have the latitude to do so. When the Romans—or what remained of them—sought repose, the Barbarians got under way, en masse. We read in a history of the invasions that the German tribes serving in the Empire’s army and administration assumed Latin names until the middle of the fifth century. After which, Germanic names became a requirement. Exhausted, in retreat on every front, the masters were no longer feared, no longer respected. What was the use of bearing their names? “A fatal somnolence reigned everywhere,” observed Salvian, bittersweet censor of the ancient deliquescence in its final stages.”

Decline Of The West
Author:Emil M. Cioran
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“In the Metro, one evening, I looked closely around me: everyone had come from somewhere else . . . Among us, though, two or three faces from here, embarrassed silhouettes that seemed to be apologising for their presence. The same spectacle in London. Today’s migrations are no longer made by compact displacements but by successive infiltrations: little by little, individuals insinuate themselves among the “natives,” too anaemic and too distinguished to stoop to the notion of a “territory.” After a thousand years of vigilance, we open the gates . . . When one thinks of the long rivalries between the French and the English, then between the French and the Germans, it seems as if each nation, by weakening one another, had as its task to speed the hour of the common downfall so that other specimens of humanity may relay them. Like its predecessor, the new Völkerwanderung will provoke an ethnic confusion whose phases cannot be distinctly foreseen. Confronted with these disparate profiles, the notion of a community homogeneous to whatever degree is inconceivable. The very possibility of so heteroclite a crowd suggests that in the space it occupies there no longer existed, among the indigenous, any desire to safeguard even the shadow of an identity. At Rome, in the third century of our era, out of a million inhabitants, only sixty thousand were of Latin stock. Once a people has fulfilled the historical idea which was its mission to incarnate, it no longer has any excuse to preserve its difference, to cherish its singularity, to safeguard its features amidst a chaos of faces.”

Decline Of The West
Book:Drawn and Quartered
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