Emil Cioran Quotes
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Transmitting one's flaws through procreation to someone else is a crime. I could never consent to give life to someone who would inherent my ailments.
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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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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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'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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Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation.
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Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do. One so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it.
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If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.
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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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I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.
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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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The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.
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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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Everyone must destroy their life. According to the way they do it, they're either triumphants or failures.
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What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!
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Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying? - that void is consciousness itself.
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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.
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Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.
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Eternity is absence.
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Reality is a creation of our excesses.
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Love of the absolute engenders a predilection for self-destruction. Hence the passion for monasteries and brothels. Cells and women, in both cases. Weariness with life fares well in the shadow of whores and saintly women.
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Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.
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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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I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.