Emil Cioran Quotes
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Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.
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Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
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To conceive a thought - just one, but one that would tear the universe to pieces.
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I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if, creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity. Yet in a less assured mood, birth seems a calamity I would be miserable not having known.
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The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don’t know where that elsewhere is.
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Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion.
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Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.
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To have committed every crime but that of being a father.
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What is marvelous is that each day brings us a new reason to disappear.
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Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral…
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Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle...
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Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.
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I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the Gods have been against me.
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An anxious man constructs his terrors, then installs himself within them: a stay-at-home in a yawning chasm.
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We suffer: the external world begins to exist...; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality.
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To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement.
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That fear which gives birth to thoughts, and the fear of thoughts…
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Only the idiot is equipped to breathe.
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No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
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Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself.
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My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.
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What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.
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Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.
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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.