Emil Cioran Quotes
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To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.
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To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.
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Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes - desertion after desertion.
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Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!
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To withstand any truth…
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Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
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Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
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From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.
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The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
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Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.
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If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.
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I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.
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Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
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The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so...
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Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
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It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.
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The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous.
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By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let 'desire' be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.
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Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
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When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.
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Once you see that everything is unreal, you can't see why you should bother to prove it.
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Self-knowledge - the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?
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Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.
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The advantage of meditating upon life and death is being able to say anything at all about them.