Émile Michel Cioran: Zitate auf Englisch (seite 4)

“Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.”

“"Do I look like someone who has something to do here on Earth?" - That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.”

“I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?”

“In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.”

“When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What's your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act."”

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

“I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.”

“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.”

“Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.”

“Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.”

“To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.”

“Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.”

“Revenge is not always sweet: once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.”

“By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.”

“Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.”

“Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.”

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

“Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection.”

“There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.”