Émile Michel Cioran: Zitate auf Englisch (seite 22)

“Word — that invisible dagger.”

“Late at night. I feel like falling into a frenzy, doing some unprecedented thing to release myself, but I don't see against whom, against what…”

“Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself.”

“Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.”

“Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?”

“One hardly saves a world without ruling it.”

“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.”

“What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.”

“We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.”

“To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement.”

“Death poses a problem which replaces all the others. What is deadly to philosophy, to the naive belief in the hierarchy of perplexities.”

“For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.”

“To conceive a thought — just one, but one that would tear the universe to pieces.”

“I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide...”

“One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.”

“A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.”

“Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.”

“A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.”

“A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.”