Emil Cioran citáty

strana 11

„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?“

“Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?”

“So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.”

“The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.”

“We suffer: the external world begins to exist...; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality.”

“The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.”

“Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves — that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it.”

“If I used to ask myself, over a coffin, "what good did it do the occupant to be born?" I now put the same question about anyone alive.”

“When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.”

“To think is to run after insecurity, to be demoralized for grandiose trifles, to immure oneself in abstractions with a martyr's avidity, to hunt up complications the way others pursue collapse or gain. The thinker is by definition keen for torment.”

“In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.”

“The real, the unique misfortune: to see the light of day. A disaster which dates back to aggressiveness, to the seed of expansion and rage within origins, to the tendency to the worst which first shook them up.”

“Buddhism calls anger "corruption of the mind," Manicheism "root of the tree of death." I know this, but what good does it do me to know?”

“A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It's not easy to be on the wrong foot with life”

“History shows that the thinkers who mounted on the top of the ladder of questions, who set their foot on the last rung, that of the absurd, have bequeathed to posterity only an example of sterility.”

“I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.”

“As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and aesthetic ideals? It's all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?”

“Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying?”

“"What's wrong - what's the matter with you?" Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for…”

“I seem to myself, among civilised men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.”

“In a single second we do away with all seconds; God himself could not do as much.”

“Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.”

“The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them.”

“Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion.”

“Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what — it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?”

“Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith — of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever. The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth. We are unfair to a Nero, a Tiberius: it was not they who invented the concept heretic: they were only degenerate dreamers who happened to be entertained by massacres. The real criminals are men who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic.”

“Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.”

“Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.”

“Knowledge is the plague of life, and consciousness, an open wound in its heart.”

“The advantage of meditating upon life and death is being able to say anything at all about them.”