Emil Cioran Quotes

I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.

Everything that lives makes noise. What an argument for the mineral kingdom!

Extraordinary and null - these two adjectives apply to the sexual act, and, consequently, to everything resulting from it, to life first of all.

I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide ...

And who was ever bold enough to do nothing because every action is senseless in infinity?

We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.

I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.

I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.

Our obsession with birth, by shifting us to a point before our past, robs us of our pleasure in the future, in the present, and even in the past.

I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.

To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing.

Even when they desert hell, men do so only to reconstruct it elsewhere.

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.

A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.

We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.

If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.

How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.

I wonder through the days like a whore in a world with no sidewalks.

Not to have been born, merely musing on that - what freedom, what space!

It is my prejudice against everything that turns out well that has given me a taste for reading history.

To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!

Characteristic of sickness to stay awake when everything sleeps, when everything is at rest, even the sick man.

I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.

When the habit of seeing things as they are turns into a mania, we lament the madman we have been and are no longer.

You kill yourself only if, in some respects, you have always been outside of it all.

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

Some of Mozart's Andantes emanate an ethereal desolation, a sort of dream funeral in another life.

I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?

The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity ...

Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' - That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.

Agression is a trait common to men and new gods.

Memories vanish when we want to remember, but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget.

What do you do from morning to night?"
"I endure myself.

We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job ...

Nero would be long since forgotten without his outbursts of bloody clowning. ~ Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

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

I dream of a world where one could die for a comma.

I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.

Every thought should recall the ruin of a smile.

Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.

A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people.

It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.

The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.

There is a whole range of melancholy: it begins with a smile and a landscape and ends with the clang of a broken bell in the soul

I would like to forget everything, to forget myself and to forget the world.

Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy!

My vision of the future is so exact that if I had children, I should strangle them here and now.

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live
moreover, the only one.

In flawed families, a scion appears who dedicates himself to the truth and who ruins himself in its pursuit.

What they ask you for is actions, proofs, works, and all you can produce are transformed tears.

Death is the solidest thing life has invented so far

I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.

The deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life.

Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.

We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.

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

One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.

I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.

I would like to be free, totaly free ... free like an aborted child.

To be objective is to treat others as you treat an object, a corpse - to behave with them like an undertaker.

Without the idea of suicide I would have surely killed myself.

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us theirs?

Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

There was a time when time did not yet exist. ... The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

I don't know how to make peace with things, were each moment to tear itself away from time to give me a kiss.

Bluntly: my rebellion is a faith to which I subscribe without believing in it.

Unmaking, decreating, is the only task man may take upon himself, if he aspires, as everything suggests, to distinguish himself from the Creator.

We are all deep in a hell, each of which is a miracle.

Ambition is a drug that turns it's addicts into potential madmen.

Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.

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

The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.

For the normal man, life is an undisputed reality; only the sick man is delighted by life and praises it so that he won't collapse.

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

There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.

To accomplish nothing and die of the strain

Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.

To the chosen people God ensured eternity through hatred.

There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.

Nothing more to pursue, except the pursuit of nothing.

Shyness, inexhaustible source of misfortunes in practical life, is the direct cause, indeed unique, each inner wealth.

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

The lot of the man who has rebelled too much is to have no energy left except for disappointment.

The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.

A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.

One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.

Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded a complete failure.

A conscious fruit fly would have to confront exactly the same difficulties, the same kind of insoluble problems as man.

Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.

Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

In all the edifices of thought, I have found no category on which to rest my head. Whereas Chaos - there's a pillow!