Émile Michel Cioran: Zitate auf Englisch (seite 9)

“A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints.”

“How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.”

“No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.”

“All morning, I did nothing but repeat: "Man is an abyss, man is an abyss." - I could not, alas, find anything better.”

“To make more plans than an explorer or a crook, yet to be infected at the will's very root.”

“Reality is a creation of our excesses.”

“Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.”

“Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself — there is no wish I make more often.”

“I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.”

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

“I don't need any support, advice, or compassion, because even if I am the most ruinous man, I still feel so powerful, so strong and fierce. For I am the only one that lives without hope.”

“To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously.”

“Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.”

“Of all calumnies the worst is the one which attacks our indolence, which contests its authenticity.”

“The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous.”

“For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.”

“The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?”

“Of all that makes us suffer, nothing — so much as disappointment — gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.”

“The universal view melts things into a blur.”