Emil Cioran Quotes
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I think of so many people who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death.
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Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
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Anxiety - or the fanaticism of the worst.
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What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.
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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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The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity… Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does this whispering voice say? Everything in us that is not human anymore.
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Death poses a problem which replaces all the others. What is deadly to philosophy, to the naive belief in the hierarchy of perplexities.
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By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?
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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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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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Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?
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God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.
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Facing a landscape annihilated by the light, to remain serene supposes a temper I do not have. The sun is my purveyor of black thoughts; and summer the season when I have always reconsidered my relations with this world and with myself, to the greatest prejudice of both.
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A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
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We regret not having the courage to make such and such decision; we regret much more having made one - any one. Better no action than the consequences of an action.
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To hope is to contradict the future.
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I seem to myself, among civilised men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.
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What are you waiting for in order to give up?
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Existing is plagiarism.
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I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.
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Late at night. I feel like falling into a frenzy, doing some unprecedented thing to release myself, but I don't see against whom, against what...
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Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life.
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What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.
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The Creation was the first act of sabotage.