Emil Cioran citáty

strana 15

„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?“

“Word — that invisible dagger.”

“Late at night. I feel like falling into a frenzy, doing some unprecedented thing to release myself, but I don't see against whom, against what…”

“Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself.”

“Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.”

“Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?”

“One hardly saves a world without ruling it.”

“Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.”

“What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.”

“We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.”

“To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement.”

“Death poses a problem which replaces all the others. What is deadly to philosophy, to the naive belief in the hierarchy of perplexities.”

“For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.”

“To conceive a thought — just one, but one that would tear the universe to pieces.”

“I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide...”

“One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.”

“A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.”

“Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.”

“A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.”

“A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.”

“Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.”

“I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.”

“Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?”

“Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing — between two fictions.”

“Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.”

“Without its assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation?”

“The need to devour oneself absolves one of the need to believe.”

“Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.”

“Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.”

“We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.”