Emil Cioran Quotes
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The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
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Hope is the normal form of delirium.
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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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I dream of wanting - and all I want seems to me worthless.
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Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?
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Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.
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If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!
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Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
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'What do you do from morning to night?' 'I endure myself.'
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To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.
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A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse.
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If I were to go blind, what would bother me the most would be no longer to be able to stare idiotically at the passing clouds.
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We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.
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To fear is to die every minute.
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To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.
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What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!
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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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Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
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In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future.
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Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?
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One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.
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Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
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I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide.
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To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.