The New Gods Quotes

“Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone.”
― Émile Michel Cioran, The New Gods

“The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.”
― Emil Cioran, The New Gods

“To look for a meaning in anything is less the act of a naif than of a masochist.”
― Emil Cioran, The New Gods

“Frivolous, disconnected, an amateur at everything, I shall have known thoroughly only the disadvantage of having been born.”
― Emil Cioran, The New Gods

“Our power resides in our incapacity to know how alone we are.”
― Emil Cioran, The New Gods

“What they ask you for is actions, proofs, works, and all you can produce are transformed tears.”
― Emil Cioran, The New Gods

“We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.”
― Emil Cioran, The New Gods

“Freedom is the right to difference; being plurality, it postulates the dispersion of the absolute, its resolution into a dust of truths, equally justified and provisional. There is an underlying polytheism in liberal democracy (call it an unconscious polytheism); conversely, every authoritarian regime partakes of a disguised monotheism.”
― Emil Cioran, The New Gods

“His sterility was infinite: it partook of ecstasy.”
― Emil Cioran, The New Gods

“Chatter: any conversation with someone who has not suffered.”
― Emil Cioran, The New Gods

“With all due respect to Tertullian, the soul is naturally pagan. Any god at all, when he answers to our immediate needs, represents for us an increase of vitality, a stimulus, which is not the case if he is imposed upon us or if he corresponds to no necessity. Paganism’s mistake was to have accepted and accumulated too many of them: it died of generosity and excess of understanding—it died from a lack of instinct.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The New Gods

“What place do we occupy in the "universe"? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we are evidently so insignificant? Once we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.”
― Emil Cioran, The New Gods

“There is an underlying polytheism in liberal democracy (call it an unconscious polytheism); conversely, every authoritarian regime partakes of a disguised monotheism. Curious, the effects of monotheist logic: a pagan, once he became a Christian, tended toward intolerance. Better to founder with a horde of accommodating gods than to prosper in a despot’s shadow! In an age when, lacking religious conflicts, we witness ideological ones, the question raised for us is indeed the one which haunted a waning antiquity: how to renounce so many gods for just one?”
― Emil M. Cioran, The New Gods

“The most serious disadvantage a Christian encounters is that of not being able to serve consciously more than one god, though he has the latitude to adhere, in practice, to several (the worship of saints!). A salutary adherence which has permitted polytheism to continue, in spite of everything, indirectly. Without it, an excessively pure Christianity would not have failed to found a universal schizophrenia.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The New Gods

“A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed. The Christians, not daring to attack the Empire head on, waylaid its religion. They let themselves be persecuted only to be able to fulminate against it all the more effectively, in order to satisfy their irrepressible appetite for execration. How wretched they would have been had no one deigned to promote them to the rank of victims! Everything in paganism, including toleration, exasperated them. Strong in their certainties, they could not understand resignation to likelihood, in the pagan manner, nor adherence to a worship whose priests, mere magistrates appointed to the perfunctory forms of ritual, imposed upon no one the burden of sincerity.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The New Gods

“Psychoanalysis will be entirely discredited one of these days, no doubt about it. Which will not keep it from destroying our last vestiges of naivete. After psychoanalysis, we can never again be innocent.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The New Gods

“Polytheism corresponds better to the diversity of our tendencies and our impulses, which it offers the possibility of expressing, of manifesting; each of them being free to tend, according to its nature, toward the god who suits it at the moment. But how deal with a single god? How envisage him, how utilize him? In his presence, we live continually under pressure. Monotheism curbs our sensibility: it deepens us by narrowing us. A system of constraints which affords us an inner dimension at the cost of the flowering of our powers, it constitutes a barrier, it halts our expansion, it throws us out of gear. Surely we were more normal with several gods than we are with only one. If health is a criterion, what a setback monotheism turns out to be!”
― Emil M. Cioran, The New Gods

“A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The New Gods

“When we realize that life is endurable only if we can change gods, and that monotheism contains the germ of every form of tyranny, we stop commiserating with the ancient institution of slavery. It was better to be a slave and to be able to worship one’s chosen deity than to be “free” and to confront only a single variety of the divine. Freedom is the right to difference; being plurality, it postulates the dispersion of the absolute, its resolution into a dust of truths, equally justified and provisional.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The New Gods