Emil Cioran on Knowledge

"Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin."

"When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it."

"The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words."

"To tell the truth, I couldn't care less about the relativity of knowledge, simply because the world does not deserve to be known."

"On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I."

"What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification."

"Buddhism calls anger "corruption of the mind," Manicheism "root of the tree of death." I know this, but what good does it do me to know?"

"The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise."

"The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character — precisely that and nothing more."

"When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation."

"Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves."

"We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune."

"To make more plans than an explorer or a crook, yet to be infected at the will's very root."

"I don't understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday."

"Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride."

"An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it."

"The farther men get from God, the farther they advance into the knowledge of religions."

"Knowledge is the plague of life, and consciousness, an open wound in its heart."

"There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition."

"If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned — a saint or a corpse."

"Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn't deserve to be known."

"What's wrong — what's the matter with you?" Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for..."

"My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are."

"To suffer is to produce knowledge."

"How I wish I didn't know anything about myself and this world!"

"Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself."

"“Meeting, after several years, someone we used to know as a child, the first glance almost always suggests that some great disaster must have befallen him” Leopardi, quoted by cioran."

"Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser."

"Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it."

"I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world."