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Quotes from Tears and Saints — Emil Cioran

1911–1995 France

← All quotes by Emil Cioran

29 quotes

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

Tears and Saints (1937)

Life is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it.

Tears and Saints (1937)

The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness.

Tears and Saints (1937)

A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.

Tears and Saints (1937)

Saints live in flames; wise men, next to them.

Tears and Saints (1937)

Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.

Tears and Saints (1937)

As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.

Tears and Saints (1937)

There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.

Tears and Saints (1937)

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

Tears and Saints (1937)

A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people.

Tears and Saints (1937)

If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.

Tears and Saints (1937)

From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.

Tears and Saints (1937)

Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion.

Tears and Saints (1937)

The initial revelation of any monastery: everything is nothing. Thus begin all mysticisms. It is less than one step from nothing to God, for God is the positive expression of nothingness.

Tears and Saints (1937)

To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze.

Tears and Saints (1937)

The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.

Tears and Saints (1937)

Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are.

Tears and Saints (1937)

All that is Life in me urges me to give up God.

Tears and Saints (1937)

Read day and night, devour books — these sleeping pills — not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.

Tears and Saints (1937)

To fear is to die every minute.

Tears and Saints (1937)

Attribution

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