Emil Cioran Quotes
-
To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.
-
A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse.
-
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
-
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.
-
Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes - desertion after desertion.
-
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.
-
Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?
-
If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!
-
'What do you do from morning to night?' 'I endure myself.'
-
Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
-
To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
-
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
-
To fear is to die every minute.
-
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.
-
In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future.
-
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.
-
What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!
-
Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
-
One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.
-
Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?
-
On the frontiers of the self: 'What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I.'