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Quotes from Anathemas and Admirations — Emil Cioran

1911–1995 France

← All quotes by Emil Cioran

54 quotes

My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

Without will, no conflict: no tragedy among the abulic. Yet the failure of will can be experienced more painfully than a tragic destiny.

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes — desertion after desertion.

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

To be or not to be...Neither one nor the other.

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment.

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the Gods have been against me.

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

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.

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

If I were asked to summarize as briefly as possible my vision of things, to reduce it to its most succinct expression, I should replace words with an exclamation point, a definitive !

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Emil Cioran (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.