Emil Cioran Quotes
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What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?
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It makes no sense to say that death is the goal of life, but what else is there to say?
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A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...
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I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action - mother of all vices - I am the cause of no one's suffering.
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Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?
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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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It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
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For a long time-always, in fact-I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn’t able to deal with it; for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.
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The only subversive mind is the one that questions the obligation to exist; all the others, the anarchist at the top of the list, compromise with the established order.
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What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.
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Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
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Read day and night, devour books-these sleeping pills-not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.
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Two enemies - the same man divided.
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Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.
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Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.
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Sadness makes you God's prisoner.
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What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.
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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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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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At different degrees, everything is pathology, except for indifference.
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I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.
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Everyone is mistaken, everyone lives in illusion. At best, we can admit a scale of fictions, a hierarchy of unrealities, giving preference to one rather than to another; but to choose, no, definitely not that...
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We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.
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I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.