Emil Cioran Quotes

Nobody gets any guarantees.

Perhaps no one as yet has been truthful enough about what "truthfulness" is.

The Bible holds up before us ideals that are within sight of the weakest and the lowliest, and yet so high that the best and the noblest are kept with their faces turned ever upward. It carries the call of the Saviour to the remotest corners of the earth; on its pages are written the assurances of the present and our hopes for the future

I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.

Truth will do well enough if left to shift for herself.

A man's religion consists, not of the many things he is in doubt of and tries to believe, but of the few he is assured of and has no need of effort for believing.

Don't be afraid of enemies who attack you. Be afraid of the friends who flatter you.

In every age and every generation, men have envisioned a promised land. Some may have envisioned it with the wrong ideology, with the wrong philosophical presupposition. But men in every generation thought in terms of some promised land.

Everyone should study at least enough philosophy and belles-lettres to make his sexual experience more delectable.

Slender certainty is better than portentous falsehood.

The past feels distant, even when it's near. The future feels assured, even when it isn't.

When I'm approached by brands I use the kind of philosophy - I don't really get into a project unless I feel I can make something that will be honest for me.

Truth is not the enemy and whatever does not kill us, sets us free.

The ideal has many names, and beauty is but one of them.

It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust but to know.

Let us never doubt everything that ought to happen is going to happen.

The gift of truth excels all other gifts.

To one completely committed to this realm of becoming, as are the empiricists, the claim to apprehend verities is a sign of psychopathology. Probably we have here but a highly sophisticated expression of the doctrine that ideals are hallucination and that the only normal, sane person is the healthy extrovert, making instant, instinctive adjustments to the stimuli of the material world.

Modern man lives increasingly in the future and neglects the present.

Identify the dominant philosophy of a society and you can predict its future.

Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been.

Tomorrow is more sure than just about anything else in the entire world.

When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to which also Plato was debtor.

Do not be angry with me if I tell you the truth

Never is a promise, and you can't afford to lie.