Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire.
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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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A man does not kill himself, as is commonly supposed, in a fit of madness but rather in a fit of unendurable lucidity, in a paroxysm which may, if so desired, be identified with madness; for an excessive perspicacity, carried to the limit and of which one longs to be rid at all costs, exceeds the context of reason.
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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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I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.
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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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Reality is a creation of our excesses.
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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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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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Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.
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Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
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Sadness makes you God's prisoner.
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To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze.
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Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.
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One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
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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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By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.
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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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Everyone must destroy their life. According to the way they do it, they're either triumphants or failures.
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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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What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!