Occasionally, someone here will begin a thread of quotes that make us all nod and smile and feel all fuzzy-wuzzy inside.
This is not that thread. Observe:
(Bold for legibility only)
"All belief makes us insolent; newly acquired, it inspires the worst
instincts; people who do not share it appear either impotent or
vanquished, deserving only pity and scorn. Consider the neophytes in
politics and especially in religion, all those who have managed to
interest God in their arrangements, the converts, the nouveaux
riches of the Absolute. Compare their impertinence with the modesty
and good manners of those who are in the process of losing their
faith and their convictions..." -- E. M. Cioran
"You side with life only when you utter--with all your heart--a
banality." -- E. M. Cioran
"To have devoted to the idea of death all the hours which any
vocation demands...Metaphysical outbursts are the attribute of
monks, debauchees, and bums. A job would have turned Buddha into a
mere malcontent." -- E. M. Cioran
"What gives me the illusion of never having been duped is that I have
never loved anything without having thereby hated it." -- E. M. Cioran
"If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God." -- E. M. Cioran
"Who, in pitch-darkness, looking into a mirror, has not seen
projected there the crimes which await him?" -- E. M. Cioran
"When I shave," this half-mad man once told me, "who if not God
keeps me from cutting my own throat?"--Faith, in other words, would
be no more than an artifice of the instinct of self-preservation.
Biology everywhere. -- E. M. Cioran
"Why Being or some other capitalized word? God sounded better. We
ought to have kept that one. After all, shouldn't reasons of euphony
regulate truth-functions?" -- E. M. Cioran