Emil Cioran Quotes
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It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
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In theory, it matters little to me whether I live as whether I die; in practice, I am lacerated by every anxiety which opens an abyss between life and death.
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I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.
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Once you see that everything is unreal, you can't see why you should bother to prove it.
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Pursued by our origins…we all are.
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To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing
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Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.
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When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.
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Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.
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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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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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Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
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'I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside.' This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works on introspection.
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I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?
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Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
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One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.
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There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
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Thanks to depression - that alpinism of the indolent - we scale every summit and daydream over every precipice from our bed.
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When we know what words are worth, the amazing thing is that we try to say anything at all, and that we manage to do so. This requires, it is true, a supernatural nerve.
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Try to be free: you will die of hunger.
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It has been a long time since philosophers have read men’s souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.
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Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.
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Without will, no conflict: no tragedy among the abulic. Yet the failure of will can be experienced more painfully than a tragic destiny.
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The moment we believe we've understood everything grants us the look of a murderer.