Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
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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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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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Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
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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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In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future.
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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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To fear is to die every minute.
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Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
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I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.
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On the frontiers of the self: 'What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I.'
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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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Once you see that everything is unreal, you can't see why you should bother to prove it.
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How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.
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To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.
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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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Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
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My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.
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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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Only thoughts that are randomly born die. The other thoughts we carry with us without knowing them. They have abandoned themselves to forgetfulness so that they can be with us all the time.
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To be or not to be...Neither one nor the other.
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As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.