Cioran – On the Heights of Despair


“This world is not worth a sacrifice in the name of an idea or a belief. How much happier are we today because others have died for our well-being and enlightenment? Well-being? Enlightenment? If anybody had died so that I could be happy, then I would be even more unhappy, because I do not want to build my life on a graveyard.” (pp. 33)

“True thinking resembles a demon who muddies the spring of life or a sickness which corrupts its roots. To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life, to leave behind you, as symbols of you life’s drama, a trail of smoke and blood – all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you.” (pp. 42)

“Knowledge is the plague of life, and consciousness, an open wound in the heart.” (p. 43)

“The spirit is an offspring of an existential illness, and Man is a sick animal. Spirit in life is an anomaly. I have renounced so much, why should I not renounce spirit as well? But besides being an illness of life, is not renunciation first and foremost an illness of the spirit?” (p. 48)


“I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to empty abstraction.”
Emil M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.”
Emil M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.”
Emil M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.”
Emil M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“Tears do not burn except in solitude.”
Emil M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

 

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