Emil Cioran citáty

strana 13

„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?“

“His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.”

“Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.”

“"What is truth?" is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to "How to endure life?" And even this one pales beside the next: "How to endure oneself?" - That is the crucial question in which no one is in a position to give us an answer.”

“Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what's the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?”

“Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.”

“What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?”

“I think of so many people who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death.”

“As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.”

“For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.”

“It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.”

“As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.”

“You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness.”

“Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream.”

“Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral…”

“I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass — which is better than trying to fill them.”

“Glory — once achieved, what is it worth?”

“Nothing deserves to be undone, doubtless because nothing deserved to be done.”

“That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.”

“We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface…”

“Skepticism is an exercise in defascination.”

“Creation is in fact a fault, man's famous sin thereby appearing as a minor version of a much graver one. What are we guilty of, except of having followed, more or less slavishly, the Creator's example? Easy to recognize in ourselves the fatality which was His: not for nothing have we issued from the hands of a wicked and woebegone god, a god accursed.”

“To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.”

“The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.”

“Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world.”

“What place do we occupy in the "universe"? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we are evidently so insignificant? Once we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.”

“The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy.”

“Tolerance — the function of an extinguished ardor — tolerance cannot seduce the young.”

“God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.”

“When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.”