Emil Cioran Quotes
Best 10 On the Heights of Despair Quotes by Emil Cioran
On the Heights of Despair Quotes
“As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?”
“How I wish I didn't know anything about myself and this world!”
“How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history—greater than the fall of empires—I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.”
“I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?”
“I would like to be free, totaly free... free like an aborted child.”
“If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.”
“No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.”
“Tears do not burn except in solitude.”
“True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.”
“We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.”
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“Ancient tradition has a saying: 'The infinitely distant is the return'. Among the maxims of Zen that point in the same direction is the statement that the 'great revelation', acquired through a series of mental and spiritual crises, consists in the recognition that 'no one and nothing 'extraordinary' exists in the beyond'; only the real exists.
Reality is, however, lived in a state in which 'there is no subject of the experience nor any object that is experienced', and under the sign of a type of absolute presence, 'the immanent making itself transcendent and the transcendent immanent'.
The teaching is that at the point at which one seeks the Way, one finds oneself further from it, the same being valid for the perfection and 'realization' of the self. The cedar in the courtyard, a cloud casting its shadow on the hills, falling rain, a flower in bloom, the monotonous sound of waves: all these 'natural' and banal facts can suggest absolute illumination, the satori.
As mere facts they are without meaning, finality, or intention, but as such they have an absolute meaning. Reality appears this way, in the pure state of 'things being as they are.'
The moral counterpart is indicated in sayings such as: 'The pure and immaculate ascetic does not enter nirvana, and the monk who breaks the rules does not go to hell,' or: 'You have no liberation to seek from bonds, because you have never been bound.”
