Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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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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Boredom is a larval anxiety; depression, a dreamy hatred.
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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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Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.
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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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Pursued by our origins…we all are.
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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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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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Without its assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation?
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Nothing is indefensible - from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime.
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We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.
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Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are.
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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 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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Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world.
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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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Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream.
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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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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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Sadness makes you God's prisoner.
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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.