Anathemas and Admirations Quotes

“However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness, and caprice.”
― Emil Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“Everything that can be classified is perishable. Only what is susceptible to several interpretations endures.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“It takes an enormous humility to die. The strange thing is that everyone turns out to have it!”
― Emil Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“Were we in the habit of looking beyond the specific content of ideologies and doctrines, we should see that to claim kinship with one of them rather than some other does not at all imply much expenditure of sagacity. Those following one party imagine they differ from those following another, whereas all, once they choose, join each other underneath, participate in one and the same nature, and vary only in appearance, by the mask they assume.”
― Emil Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations

“اولئك الاطفال الذين لم ارغب فيهم لو يعلمون باى سعادة هم مدينون لى”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“To dissect a poem as if it were a system is a crime, even a sacrilege.”
― Emil Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“Femeia a contat în ochii noştri cât timp a simulat pudoarea şi reţinerea. Ce eroare, din parte-i, să înceteze să-şi mai joace rolul! Deja nu mai valorează nimic, de vreme ce ne seamănă. Aşa dispare una din ultimele minciuni care făceau existenţa suportabilă.”
― Emil Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“Every anomaly seduces us, Life in the first place, that anomaly par excellence.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“Expression diminishes you, impoverishes you, lifts weights off you: expression is loss of substance, and liberation.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“The leftist's despair is to battle in the name of principles that forbid him cynicism.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“Old age is the most unexpected thing of all that happens to man," - notes Trotsky a few years before his end. If, as a young man, he had had the exact, visceral intuition of this truth, what a miserable revolutionary he would have made!”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“كل ما يضايقنا يساعدنا على تحديد انفسنا من دون مضايقات لا امكان لهوية”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“«De Maistre si Edgar Poe m-au invatat sa gandesc.» Aceasta marturisire a lui Baudelaire m-a indemnat sa citesc Serile de la Sankt-Petersburg si celelalte lucrari ale celui mai patimas si mai intolerant dintre ganditori. Adevarurile lui si, mai mult inca, nebuniile lui au un farmec de netagaduit. Un monstru fascinant. La antipod, Valery seduce prin retinere. Nici o dogma, nici un exces nu sunt legate de numele sau. N-a pacatuit decat prin eleganta. Am formulat, in ce-l priveste, o serie de judecati nedrepte, izvorate dintr-o exasperare impura pe care imi fac datoria de a o denunta aici. Textele care urmeaza, fie despre Michaux, Saint-John Perse, Fondane, Beckett, Eliade, Maria Zambrano, fie despre Borges, Weininger, Fitzgerald, sunt vrand-nevrand capricioase, ca tot ce deriva din admiratie, din prietenie sau din entuziasm necontrolat.”
― Emil Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“What is an argument for the defense that neither torments nor troubles — what is a eulogy that fails to kill? Every apology should be a murder by enthusiasm.”
― Emil Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations

“Cei sănătoşi nu sunt reali. Au totul, în afară de fiinţă - pe care doar o sănătate îndoielnică ţi-o dă.”
― Emil Cioran, Mărturisiri şi anateme

“A citi inseamnă să-l laşi pe altul să trudească pentru tine. Cea mai gingaşă formă de exploatare.”
― Emil Cioran, Mărturisiri şi anateme

“Murim de la începutul timpurilor şi totuşi moartea nu şi-a pierdut defel prospeţimea. Aici e taina tainelor.”
― Emil Cioran, Mărturisiri şi anateme

“Can we imagine a city dweller who does not have the soul of a murderer?”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“An inexorable law strikes and directs societies and civilizations. When, for lack of vitality, the past collapses, clinging to it serves no purpose - and yet it is this attachment to antiquated forms of life, to lost or bad causes, that makes so touching the anathemas of a de Maistre or a Bonald. Everything seems admirable and everything is false in the Utopian vision; everything is execrable and everything seems true in the observations of the reactionaries.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“The passion for prophesying then seizes everyone; skeptics and fanatics alike delight in the idea of disaster and give themselves up in concert to the pleasure of having foreseen and trumpeted it abroad. But it is especially the theoreticians of Reaction who exult (tragically, no doubt) over the reality or the imminence of the worst - of the worst that is their raison d'être.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“In Marx's entire oeuvre, I don't think there is a single disinterested reflection on death... I was pondering this at his grave in Highgate.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“A patrimony all our own: the hours when we have nothing... It is they that form us, that individualize us, that make us dissimilar.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“ليس غير الموسيقى لانشاء شراكة لا تنفصم بين كائنين العاطفة قابلة للفساد تتلف مثل كل ما ينتمى الى الحياة
اما الموسيقى فهى من جوهر ارقى من الحياة وبالتالى من الموت”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“Excess of deliberation frustrates all actions. To expatiate upon sexuality is to sabotage it altogether. Eroticism, scourge of deliquescent societies, is an offense against instinct, an organized impotence. We do not reflect with impunity upon exploits that dispense with reflection. Orgasm has never been a philosophical event.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“Though we ourselves have come too late, we shall be envied by our immediate successors, and still more by our remote descendants. In their eyes we shall have the look of privileged characters, and rightly so, for everyone wants to be as far as possible from the future.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“I infallibly discern a flaw in all those who are interested in the same things as myself. . . .”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“I abuse the word God; I use it often, too often. I employ it each time I touch an extremity and need a word to designate what comes after. I prefer God to the Inconceivable.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“Где-то прочел утверждение: «Бог говорит только о самом себе». Вот здесь у Всевышнего есть немало соперников.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“After the Spanish publication of the 'Précis,' two Andalusian students asked me if it was possible to live without “fundamentación.” I answered that it was true that I had found no solid basis anywhere and that I had nonetheless managed to endure, for with the years one got used to everything, even vertigo. Then, too, one does not constantly keep watch and interrogate oneself, absolute lucidity being incompatible with breathing.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms