Emil Cioran Quotes
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Two enemies - the same man divided.
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After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?
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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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At different degrees, everything is pathology, except for indifference.
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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.
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Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.
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'Where do you get those superior airs of yours?' 'I've managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?'
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Pursued by our origins…we all are.
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As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.
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When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.
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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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Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are.
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Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
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We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.
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I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
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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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Sadness makes you God's prisoner.
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Nothing is indefensible - from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime.
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Only optimists commit suicide, the optimists who can no longer be...optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?
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When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment's thought to the 'meaning' of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.
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Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world.
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A man does not kill himself, as is commonly supposed, in a fit of madness but rather in a fit of unendurable lucidity, in a paroxysm which may, if so desired, be identified with madness; for an excessive perspicacity, carried to the limit and of which one longs to be rid at all costs, exceeds the context of reason.
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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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Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?