Emil Cioran Quotes
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Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
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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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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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To conceive a thought - just one, but one that would tear the universe to pieces.
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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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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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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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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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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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Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.
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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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I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the Gods have been against me.
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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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That fear which gives birth to thoughts, and the fear of thoughts…
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To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement.
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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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I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away.
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What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.
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Only the idiot is equipped to breathe.
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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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Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.