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

“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

“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

“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

“اولئك الاطفال الذين لم ارغب فيهم لو يعلمون باى سعادة هم مدينون لى”
― Emil M. 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

“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

“كل ما يضايقنا يساعدنا على تحديد انفسنا من دون مضايقات لا امكان لهوية”
― 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

“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

“«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

“Only the prerevolutionary condition is truly revolutionary, the one in which men’s minds subscribe to the double cult, of the future and of destruction. So long as a revolution is only a possibility, it transcends history’s givens and constants; it exceeds, so to speak, its context. But once it has occurred, it conforms to that context and, prolonging the past, follows its ruts — all the more successfully if it utilizes the techniques of the reaction it had previously condemned. Every anarchist conceals, in the depth of his rebellions, a reactionary who is awaiting his hour, the hour of taking power, when the metamorphosis of chaos into . . . authority raises problems no utopia dares solve or even contemplate without falling into lyricism or absurdity.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“Each epoch tends to think that it is in some sense the last, that with it ends a cycle or all cycles. Today as yesterday, we conceive hell more readily than the golden age, apocalypse than utopia, and the idea of a cosmic catastrophe is as familiar to us as it was to the Buddhists, to the pre-Socratics, or to the Stoics. The vivacity of our terrors keeps us in an unstable equilibrium, favorable to the flowering of the prophetic gift. This is singularly true for the periods following great convulsions. 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. “I am dying with Europe,” de Maistre wrote in 1819. Two years earlier, in a letter to de Maistre himself, Bonald had expressed an analogous certitude: “I have no news for you; you are in a position to judge what we are and where we are going. Moreover, for me there are certain things that are absolutely inexplicable, escape from which does not seem to me within human power, insofar as men act by their own lights and under the influence of their wills alone; and in truth, what I see most clearly in all this ... is the Apocalypse.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“The problem of Evil actually troubles only a few sensitive souls, a few skeptics, repelled by the way in which the believer comes to terms with it or spirits it away. Hence it is to these that theodicies are primarily addressed, attempts to humanize God, frantic acrobatics that collapse and compromise themselves on this ground, constantly belied as they are by experience. Try as they will to be persuasive, they fail; they are declared suspect, incriminated, and asked for accountings, in the name of one piece of evidence — Evil — evidence that a de Maistre will attempt to deny. “Everything is Evil,” he instructs us; yet Evil, he hastens to add, comes down to a “purely negative” force that has nothing “in common with existence,” comes down to a “schism in being,” to an accident. Others will assert on the contrary that quite as constitutive of being as Good, and quite as real. Evil is nature, an essential ingredient of existence and anything but an accessory phenomenon, and that the problems Evil raises become insoluble as soon as we refuse to introduce it into the composition of the divine substance. Just as sickness is not an absence of health but a reality as positive and as lasting as health, in the same way Evil is worth as much as Good, even exceeds it in indestructibility and plenitude. Good and Evil principles coexist and mingle in God, as they coexist and mingle in the world. The notion of God’s culpability is not a gratuitous one, but necessary and perfectly compatible with the notion of His omnipotence: only such an idea confers some intelligibility on the historical process, on all it contains that is monstrous, mad, and absurd. To attribute goodness and purity to the creator of becoming is to abandon all comprehension of the majority of events, especially the most important one: the Creation. God could not avoid the influence of Evil, mainspring of actions, an agent indispensable to Whoever, exasperated by self-containment, aspires to emerge, to spread Himself and corrupt Himself in time. If Evil, the secret of our dynamism, were to withdraw from our lives, we should vegetate in that monotonous perfection of the Good which, according to Genesis, vexed Being itself. The combat between the two principles. Good and Evil, is waged on every level of existence, including eternity. We are plunged into the adventure of the Creation, one of the most dreadful of exploits, without “moral purposes” and perhaps without meaning; and though the idea and the initiative for it are God’s, we cannot reproach him for it, so great in our eyes is His prestige as the first guilty party. By making us His accomplices, He associated us with that vast movement of solidarity in Evil which sustains and affirms the universal confusion.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms