Emil Cioran Best Quotes

Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.

Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one's reach.

Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.

The best of myself, that point of light which distances me from everything, I owe to my infrequent encounters with a few bitter fools, a few disconsolate bastards, who, victims of the rigor of their cynicism, could no longer attach themselves to any vice.

At best, we conceive happiness; never felicity, prerogative of civilizations based on the idea of salvation, on the refusal to savor one’s sufferings, to revel in them; but, sybarites of suffering, scions of a masochistic tradition, which of us would hesitate between the Benares sermon and Baudelaire’s Heautontimoroumenos? I am both wound and knife”—that is our absolute, our eternity.

We pursue whatever we pursue out of torment — a need for torment. Our very quest for salvation is a torment, the subtlest, the best camoulaged of all.

In a metropolis as in a hamlet, what we still love best is to watch the fall of one of our kind.

We pursue whatever we pursue out of torment -- a need for torment. Our very quest for salvation is a torment, the subtlest, the best camouflaged of all.

Since we remember clearly only our ordeals, it is ultimately the sick, the persecuted, the victims in every realm who will have lived to the best advantage. The others - the lucky ones - have a life, of course, but not the memory of life.

In order to conquer panic or some tenacious anxiety, there is nothing like imagining your own burial. An effective method, readily available to all. In order not to have to resort to it too often in the course of a day, best to experience its benefit straight off, when you get up. Or else use it only at exceptional moments, like Pope Innocent IX, who, having commissioned a painting in which he was shown on his deathbed, glanced at it each time he had to make some important decision.

Nothing is worse than vice which is learned, aped, or borrowed; thus a rational extenuation of vice is unjustified: at best, one must single out its fecundity for those who know how to transfigure it, who can deviate its deviation. To practice it in criminal and vulgar ways is to exploit its scandalous materiality and ignore the immaterial frisson which constitutes its excellence. To attain certain heights, intimacy cannot dispense with the anxieties of vice. No man of vice can be condemned unless he ceases to look upon vice as a pretext and turns it into a goal.

Consider carefully the merest event: in the best of cases, the positive and negative elements that participate in it balance out; generally the negatives predominate. Which is to say, it would have been preferable that it not take place. We should then have been dispensed from taking part in it, enduring it. What is the good of adding anything at all to what is or seems to be? History, a futile odyssey, has no excuse, and on occasion we are tempted to inculpate art itself, however imperious the need from which it emanates. To produce is accessory; what matters is to draw on one’s own depths, to be oneself in a total fashion, without stooping to any form of expression. To have built great cathedrals derives from the same error as to have waged great battles. Better to try to live in depth than to advance through centuries toward a débâcle.

Saintliness interests me for the delirium of self-aggrandizement hidden beneath its meekness, it's Will to Power masked by goodness. Saints have used their deficiencies to their best advantage. Yet their megalomania is undefinable, strange, and moving.