25 Quotes by E.M. Cioran

You speak of God frequently. It is a word I no longer use, ' an ex-nun writes me. Not everyone has the good fortune to be disgusted by it.

Imagine him, further, without faith— a nihilist mystic— and we have the disastrous consummation of the earthly venture.

Alongside intellectual disgust develops another, deeper and more dangerous: emanating from the viscera, it ends at the severest form of nihilism, the nihilism of repletion.

Consciousness intervenes in our action only to frustrate their execution; consciousness is a perpetual interrogation of life, it is perhaps the ruin of life.

Consciousness: summa of our discomforts from birth to the present. Such discomforts have vanished; consciousness remains— but it has lost its origins, it doesn't even know what they were.

That envy is universal is best proved by the fact that it breaks out among the mad themselves in their brief intervals of lucidity.

That man is going to disappear has been, heretofore, my firm conviction. But now I've changed my mind: he must disappear.

You must have powerful religious dispositions in order to utter with conviction the word being; you must believe simply to say about an object or about someone that it or he is.

Whatever induces collapse is thereby deserving of being listened to.