Emil Cioran Quotes
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To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.
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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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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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To fear is to die every minute.
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In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future.
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What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!
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I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.
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Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
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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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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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Once you see that everything is unreal, you can't see why you should bother to prove it.
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To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.
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How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.
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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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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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If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.
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The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.
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To be or not to be...Neither one nor the other.
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Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
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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.
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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.