Emil Cioran on Mind

"The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so..."

"I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside." This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works on introspection."

"Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself — there is no wish I make more often."

"The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness."

"Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity."

"Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!"

"No one has the audacity to exclaim: "I don't want to do anything!" — we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions."

"One of the biggest paradoxes of our world: memories vanish when we want to remember, but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget."

"The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous."

"Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy."

"In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary."

"Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation."

"To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire."

"Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh."

"The only subversive mind is the one that questions the obligation to exist; all the others, the anarchist at the top of the list, compromise with the established order."

"That fear which gives birth to thoughts, and the fear of thoughts..."

"Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing."

"Out of the shadow of the abstract man, who thinks for the pleasure of thinking, emerges the organic man, who thinks because of a vital imbalance, and who is beyond science and art."

"Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers."

"When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment's thought to the "meaning" of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness."

"Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves — that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it."

"Facing a landscape annihilated by the light, to remain serene supposes a temper I do not have. The sun is my purveyor of black thoughts; and summer the season when I have always reconsidered my relations with this world and with myself, to the greatest prejudice of both."

"The reaction against your own thought in itself lends life to thought. How this reaction is born is hard to describe, because it identifies with the very rare intellectual tragedies. — The tension, the degree and level of intensity of a thought proceeds from its internal antinomies, which in turn are derived from the unsolvable contradictions of a soul. Thought cannot solve the contradictions of the soul. As far as linear thinking is concerned, thoughts mirror themselves in other thoughts, instead of mirroring a destiny."