Emil Cioran on Religion

"Nothing surpasses the pleasures of idleness: even if the end of the world were to come, I would not leave my bed at an ungodly hour."

"I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers."

"The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame."

"I seem to myself, among civilised men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers."

"We replace God as best we can; for every god is good, provided he perpetuates in eternity our desire for a crucial solitude. . . ."

"If there was a God of sorrow, he would grow black heavy wings, to soar not for the skies, but for inferno."

"Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again."

"In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world."

"In a single second we do away with all seconds; God himself could not do as much."

"I am displeased with everything. If they made me God, I would immediately resign."

"Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination."

"Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires."

"Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness."

"There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness."

"God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought."

"If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God."

"Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?"

"Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god."

"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."

"Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend."

"The initial revelation of any monastery: everything is nothing. Thus begin all mysticisms. It is less than one step from nothing to God, for God is the positive expression of nothingness."

"Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls."

"Sadness makes you God's prisoner."

"Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike."

"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."

"Eternity is absence."

"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."

"Creation is in fact a fault, man's famous sin thereby appearing as a minor version of a much graver one. What are we guilty of, except of having followed, more or less slavishly, the Creator's example? Easy to recognize in ourselves the fatality which was His: not for nothing have we issued from the hands of a wicked and woebegone god, a god accursed."

"This world was created from God's fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator. Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we live dramas for the boredom of a spectator, whose claps have never reached the ears of a mortal."

"I ask myself; Why is it that only some people suffer? Why are only some selected from the ranks of normal people and put on the torture rack? Some religions maintain that God is trying us through suffering, or that we expiate evil and unbelief through it. If such an explanation can satisfy the religious man, it is not sufficient for anyone who notices that suffering is arbitrary and unjust, because the innocent often suffer most. There is no valid justification for suffering. Suffering has no hierarchy of values.", in essay: the monopoly of suffering"