Emil Cioran Quotes
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As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad.
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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 only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.
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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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We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.
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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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Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.
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Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.
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I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
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I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.
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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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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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It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: in truth, it is itself the quintessence of injustice.
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Without its assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation?
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Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world.
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Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.
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If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
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Pursued by our origins…we all are.
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Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream.
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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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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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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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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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I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.