Top 100 Emil's Quotes
#1. Edward was good at finding Emil's most vulnerable places. Some people are like that. Siblings maybe most of all
Frances Greenslade
#2. work, whatever it must be, is the service of God and of the community and therefore the expression of man's dignity. - Emil Brunner, Gifford Lectures, 1948
Larry Niven
#3. Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what's the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?
Emil Cioran
#5. A remark of my brother's apropos of the troubles and pains our mother endured: "Old age is nature's self-criticism.
Emil M. Cioran
#6. The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It's not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.
Emil Cioran
#7. Nature's great mistake was to have been unable to confine herself to one "kingdom": juxtaposed with the vegetable, everything else seems inopportune, out of place. The sun should have sulked at the appearance of the first insect, and gone out altogether with the advent of the chimpanzee.
Emil M. Cioran
#8. It has been a long time since philosophers have read men's souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.
Emil Cioran
#9. Nothing more to pursue, except the pursuit of nothing.
Emil Cioran
#10. Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.
Emil Cioran
#11. To be objective is to treat others as you treat an object, a corpse - to behave with them like an undertaker.
Emil Cioran
#12. Frivolous, disconnected, an amateur at everything, I shall have known thoroughly only the disadvantage of having been born.
Emil M. Cioran
#13. Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy.
Emil Cioran
#14. In Buddhist writings, mention is often made of "the abyss of birth." An abyss indeed, a gulf into which we do not fall but from which, instead, we emerge, to our universal chagrin.
Emil Cioran
#15. Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.
Emil Cioran
#16. I don't blame Germans," Emil said. "I don't even blame Nazis. I blame people who want to live at the expense of others.
Steve Anderson
#17. All knowledge pushed to its limit can be dangerous, and morbid, because life is endurable solely because we don't see it through to the end. An undertaking is only possible if we have conserved a minimum of illusions. Complete lucidity is the void!
Emil Cioran
#18. How does it happen that in life as in literature, rebellion, however pure, has something false about it, whereas resignation, however tainted with listlessness, always gives the impression of authenticity
Emil Cioran
#19. Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.
Emil Cioran
#20. Call it insensitivity or a passion for remorse, I have never undertaken to rescue what little Absolute this world contains.
Emil M. Cioran
#21. Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do. One so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it.
Emil Cioran
#22. Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.
Emil Cioran
#23. Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.
Emil Cioran
#24. For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened. ...
No sooner are they open than the drama beings. To look without understanding - that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much. ...
Emil Cioran
#25. I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside.
Emil Cioran
#26. When the habit of seeing things as they are turns into a mania, we lament the madman we have been and are no longer.
Emil Cioran
#27. Your-no-our free will gives us choices and because we're not perfect, it's not always clear which choice is the right one ... So yes, we can be wrong. Yes the world's a messy place. But a world in which we always knew what was right and had no choice but to do it, that would be a world of puppets.
Emil Ostrovski
#28. You said I told you I was in love with someone else, but I'm not. That's not what I meant. Cassandra was a part of my past, but our time together ended. The only person I want, the only person I love, is you.
Angela Corbett
#29. In all the edifices of thought, I have found no category on which to rest my head. Whereas Chaos - there's a pillow!
Emil Cioran
#30. The athlete of today is not an athlete alone. He's the center of a team - doctors, scientists, coaches, agents and so on.
Emil Zatopek
#31. The art of an artist must be his own art. It is ... always a continuous chain of little inventions, little technical discoveries of one's own, in one's relation to the tool, the material and the colors.
Emil Nolde
#32. Try for a goal that's reasonable, then gradually raise it.
Emil Zatopek
#33. A work becomes a work of art when one re-evaluates the values of nature and adds one's own spirituality.
Emil Nolde
#34. I have no ideas, only obsessions. Anybody can have ideas. Ideas have never caused anybody's downfall.
Emil M. Cioran
#35. Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded a complete failure.
Emil Cioran
#37. The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue.
Emil Cioran
#38. It's at the borders of pain and suffering that the men are separated from the boys.
Emil Zatopek
#40. We must learn how to explode! Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage.
Emil Cioran
#41. Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' - That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.
Emil Cioran
#42. You can't climb up to the second floor without a ladder. When you set your aim too high and don't fulfill it, then your enthusiasm turns to bitterness. Try for a goal that's reasonable, and then gradually raise it.
Emil Zatopek
#43. If one can stick to the training throughout the many long years, then will power is no longer a problem. It's raining? That doesn't matter. I am tired? That's besides the point. It's simply that I just have to.
Emil Zatopek
#44. The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to a form of reality to reality's detriment.
Emil M. Cioran
#45. After each night we are emptier: our mysteries and our griefs have leaked away into our dreams. Thus sleep's labor not only diminishes the power of our thought, but even that of our secrets.
Emil Cioran
#46. Impartiality is incompatible with the will to affirm oneself or quite simply with the will to exist. To acknowledge another's merits is an alarming symptom, an act against nature.
Emil Cioran
#47. Essentially, boredom is centered upon time, on the horror of time, on the fear of time, the disclosure of time, the awareness of time. Those who are not aware of time passing do not get bored. It's not the time that passes, it's the time that doesn't pass.
Emil Cioran
#48. Some of Mozart's Andantes emanate an ethereal desolation, a sort of dream funeral in another life.
Emil Cioran
#49. When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What's your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act." And they do calm down.
Emil Cioran
#50. He detested objective truths, the burden of argument, sustained reasoning. He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one. Others are a dialectician's invention.
Emil Cioran
#51. But - but in falling, we fly, don't we? We fly vertically. That's the paradox of vertical flight. Falling is the only way we can fly.
Emil Ostrovski
#52. In the early 1950s, during the near avalanche of discoveries, rediscoveries, and redefinitions of subcellular components made possible by electron microscopy, those prospecting in this newly opened field were faced with the problem of what to do with their newly acquired wealth.
George Emil Palade
#53. Torn between violence and disillusionment, I seem to myself a terrorist who, going out in the street to perpetrate some outrage, stops on the way to consult Ecclesiastes or Epictetus.
Emil Cioran
#54. Art is exalted above religion and race. Not a single solitary soul these days believes in the religions of the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Greeks ... Only their art, whenever it was beautiful, stands proud and exalted, rising above all time.
Emil Nolde
#55. They work now with computers for building buildings and books, but not ever with new ideas.
Emil Ruder
#56. They should make new ways to better design buildings and books. The computer was the end of Swiss typography!
Emil Ruder
#57. Only false values prevail, because everyone can assimilate them, counterfeit them (false thereby to the second degree). An idea that succeeds is necessarily a pseudo-idea.
Emil Cioran
#58. Death is the solidest thing life has invented so far
Emil Cioran
#59. We are different, in essence, from other men. If you want to win something, run 100 meters. If you want to experience something, run a marathon.
Emil Zatopek
#60. Only god has the privilege of abandoning us. Men can only drop us
Emil M. Cioran
#61. The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life.
Emil M. Cioran
#62. Shyness, inexhaustible source of misfortunes in practical life, is the direct cause, indeed unique, each inner wealth.
Emil Cioran
#63. I have all the defects of other people and yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.
Emil Cioran
#64. You kill yourself only if, in some respects, you have always been outside of it all.
Emil Cioran
#65. The dead center of existence: when it is all the same to you whether you read a newspaper article or think about God.
Emil Cioran
#66. Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy!
Emil Cioran
#67. When we find her, I'm still going to fight for her.-Emil-
Angela Corbett
#68. When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.
Emil Cioran
#69. I had gone far in search of the sun, and the sun, found at last, was hostile to me. And if I were to fling myself off a cliff? While I was making such rather grim speculations, considering these pines, these rocks, these waves, I suddenly felt how bound I was to this lovely, accursed universe.
Emil M. Cioran
#70. I am inexpressibly grateful that the Lord of my life has granted to me in such abundance these opportunities to take part in the life of his ecclesia and to bear witness to the Living Christ in so many places and in so many ways.
Emil Brunner
#72. As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.
Emil Cioran
#73. What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?
Emil Cioran
#74. Emil Drukker, the Head-hunter of Cologne.
Earl Peirce
#75. I've never practiced a profession and have lived like a sort of student. I consider this my greatest success, my life hasn't been a failure because I succeeded in doing nothing.
Emil Cioran
#76. For a scientist, it is a unique experience to live through a period in which his field of endeavour comes to bloom - to be witness to those rare moments when the dawn of understanding finally descends upon what appeared to be confusion only a while ago - to listen to the sound of darkness crumbling.
George Emil Palade
#77. If we fail to forgive, we're rejecting our own faith.
Emil Kapaun
#78. If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
Emil Cioran
#79. It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say "we" with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke "others" and regard himself as their interpreter - for me to consider him my enemy.
Emil Cioran
#80. To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing.
Emil Cioran
#81. Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.
Emil Cioran
#82. 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.
Emil Cioran
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. It is not necessary to smile and make a wonderful impression on the judges.
Emil Zatopek
#86. Ambition is a drug that turns it's addicts into potential madmen.
Emil Cioran
#87. A free man is one who has discerned the inanity of all points of view; a liberated man is one who has drawn the consequences of such discernment.
Emil M. Cioran
#88. If only we could reach back before the concept, could write on a level with the senses, record the infinitesimal variations of what we touch, do what a reptile would do if it were to set about writing!
Emil M. Cioran
#89. By a persistent effort of will it is possible to change the whole body. The athlete must always keep in mind this concept of change and progression. He must never accept his limitations as being permanent, because they are not.
Emil Zatopek
#90. To have committed every crime but that of being a father.
Emil Cioran
#91. Between the demand to be clear,and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect.
Emil Cioran
#92. Emil wanted to serve his nation and make her great again. He wanted to be a good Nazi, he really did, but when he thought of Anne and the terrified expression on her face, he shook his head. He faked a limp all the way home.
Lee Strauss
#93. If we consider closely our so-called generous actions, there is none which, from some aspect, is not blameworthy an even harmful, so that we come to regret having performed it - so that we must choose, finally, between abstention and remorse.
Emil Cioran
#94. Clever people master life; the wise illuminate it and create fresh difficulties.
Emil Nolde
#95. We are all deep in a hell, each of which is a miracle.
Emil Cioran
#97. At this very moment, I am suffering - as we say in French, j'ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.
Emil Cioran
#98. But man is a strayed animal, and when he falls victim to doubt, if he should happen to take no further pleasure in attacking others, he turns on himself in order to inflict merciless tortures.
Emil Cioran
#99. I have recommended you the dignity of skepticism: yet here I am, prowling around the Absolute. Technique of contradiction? Remember, rather, what Flaubert said: "I am a mystic and I believe in nothing".
Emil Cioran
#100. Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?
Emil Cioran
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