Emil Cioran on Truth

"The state of health is a state of nonsensation, even of nonreality. As soon as we cease to suffer, we cease to exist."

"True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes."

"Of all that makes us suffer, nothing — so much as disappointment — gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth."

"We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false."

"Of all calumnies the worst is the one which attacks our indolence, which contests its authenticity."

"Impossible to accede to truth by opinions, for each opinion is only a mad perspective of reality."

"We suffer: the external world begins to exist . . . ; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality."

"What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts."

"Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious."

"If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth."

"Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth . . ."

"Truths begin by a conflict with the police — and end by calling them in."

"When we know what words are worth, the amazing thing is that we try to say anything at all, and that we manage to do so. This requires, it is true, a supernatural nerve."

"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."

"How can you know if you are in the truth? The criterion is simple enough: if others make a vacuum around you, there is not a doubt in the world that you are closer to the essential than they are."

"Reality is a creation of our excesses."

"Compared to the refined culture of sclerotic forms and frames, which mask everything, the lyrical mode is utterly barbarian in its expression. Its value resides precisely in its savage quality: it is only blood, sincerity, and fire."

"Everyone is mistaken, everyone lives in illusion. At best, we can admit a scale of fictions, a hierarchy of unrealities, giving preference to one rather than to another; but to choose, no, definitely not that..."

"There is no false sensation."

"To withstand any truth..."

"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 form a reality to reality's detriment."

"Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that we alone pursue the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear."