Emil Cioran citáty

strana 9

„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?“

“If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?”

“Though we may prefer ourselves to the universe, we nonetheless loathe ourselves much more than we suspect. If the wise man is so rare a phenomenon, it is because he seems unshaken by the aversion which, like all beings, he must feel for himself.”

“Everyone must destroy their life. According to the way they do it, they're either triumphants or failures.”

“When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment's thought to the "meaning" of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.”

“We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.”

“I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action — mother of all vices — I am the cause of no one's suffering.”

“I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end.”

“Anxiety — or the fanaticism of the worst.”

“That fear which gives birth to thoughts, and the fear of thoughts…”

“What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name — and moving on.”

“Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.”

“The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.”

“Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!”

“This world was created from God's fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator. Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we live dramas for the boredom of a spectator, whose claps have never reached the ears of a mortal.”

“We regret not having the courage to make such and such decision; we regret much more having made one — any one. Better no action than the consequences of an action.”

“Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!”

“Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.”

“If I were to go blind, what would bother me the most would be no longer to be able to stare idiotically at the passing clouds.”

“No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.”

“To be or not to be…Neither one nor the other.”

“What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.”

“What is not heartrending is superfluous, at least in music.”

“Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.”

“All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.”

“We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good — have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us. What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: "If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world. …" And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.”

“If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.”

“I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.”

“We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.”

“The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life.”