Emil Cioran Quotes
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In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left...with a foolish grin.
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Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves - that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it.
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Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what’s the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?
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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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There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books.
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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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For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
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No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity;––for thoughts, there is always time; life has its time; there is no thought that comes too late; any desire can become a regret.
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Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
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To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion.
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In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
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Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
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When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, 'What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act.' And they do calm down.
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We replace God as best we can; for every god is good, provided he perpetuates in eternity our desire for a crucial solitude...
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Psychoanalysis will be entirely discredited one of these days, no doubt about it. Which will not keep it from destroying our last vestiges of naivete. After psychoanalysis, we can never again be innocent.
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Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying? - that void is consciousness itself.
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Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.
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If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned - a saint or a corpse.
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In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future.
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Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world.
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I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.
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Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what-it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?
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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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To fear is to die every minute.