Emil Cioran Quotes
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The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character - precisely that and nothing more.
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This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.
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We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die. - Didn't you know that's how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?
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If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!
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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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The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
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Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!
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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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To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.
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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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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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…all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint.
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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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To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.
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'What do you do from morning to night?' 'I endure myself.'
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We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface...
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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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Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
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What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!
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In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future.
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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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To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.
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Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
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Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?