Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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Nothing is indefensible - from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime.
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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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Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
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Two enemies - the same man divided.
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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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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 recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
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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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It makes no sense to say that death is the goal of life, but what else is there to say?
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Sadness makes you God's prisoner.
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Consciousness is nature's nightmare.
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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?
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To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire.
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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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Everyone must destroy their life. According to the way they do it, they're either triumphants or failures.
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I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
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Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are.
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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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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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If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.
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We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.
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Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.