Emil Cioran Quotes
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Awareness of time: assault on time...
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Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
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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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The advantage of meditating upon life and death is being able to say anything at all about them.
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The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.
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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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One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.
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If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?
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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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The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.
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There is no false sensation.
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It is not by genius, it is by suffering, and suffering alone, that one ceases to be a marionette.
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What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.
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What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.
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Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man.
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Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.
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A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...
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At different degrees, everything is pathology, except for indifference.
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We are all secularised anarchists today.
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However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.
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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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…all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint.
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Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
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To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.