Emil Cioran citáty

strana 10

„Filozofie nabízí protilátku proti melancholii. A mnozí stále věří v hloubku filozofie!“

„Když víte, že nic není skutečné, nechápete, proč byste se měli namáhat s dokazováním.“

„Největší událostí druhé poloviny 20. století je zanikání chodníků.“

„Ani všichni filozofové světa spolu nemají takovou hodnotu jako jeden světec.“

„Člověk se naplní teprve tehdy, když přestane být člověkem.“

„Koneckonců, proč by obyčejní lidé měli chtít uvažovat o konci, zvláště když vidíme, v jakém stavu jsou ti, kteří o něm uvažují?“

„Říkával jsi, že musíme žít, jako bychom nikdy neměli zemřít. Copak nevíš, že tak žijí všichni, včetně těch, kteří jsou posedlí smrtí?“

„Na co čekáte, abyste to vzdali?“

“We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false.”

“Life inspires more dread than death — it is life which is the great unknown.”

“Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.”

“The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so…”

“What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.”

“I want to proclaim a truth that would forever exile me from among the living. I know only the conditions but not the words that would allow me to formulate it.”

“Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.”

“What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!”

“Awareness of time: assault on time...”

“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.”

“Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.”

“I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.”

“Compared to the refined culture of sclerotic forms and frames, which mask everything, the lyrical mode is utterly barbarian in its expression. Its value resides precisely in its savage quality: it is only blood, sincerity, and fire.”

“There exists, I grant you, a clinical depression, upon which certain remedies occasionally have effect; but there exists another kind, a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself.”

“The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world.”

“History proves nothing because it contains everything.”

“I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.”

“In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.”

“I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to empty abstraction.”

“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.”

“Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.”

“It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should avoid simulacra and even "realities"; you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a "solitary elephant.”

“It is difficult, it is impossible to believe that the Good Lord—“Our Father”—had a hand in the scandal of creation. Everything suggests that He took no part in it, that it proceeds from a god without scruples, a feculent god. Goodness does not create, lacking imagination; it takes imagination to put together a world, however botched. At the very least, there must be a mixture of good and evil in order to produce an action or a work.”

“From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.”

“This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears.”

“Existing is plagiarism.”

“The reaction against your own thought in itself lends life to thought. How this reaction is born is hard to describe, because it identifies with the very rare intellectual tragedies.”

“We say: he has no talent, only tone. But tone is precisely what cannot be invented — we're born with it. Tone is an inherited grace, the privilege some of us have of making our organic pulsations felt — tone is more than talent, it is its essence.”

“Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.”