Emil Cioran Quotes
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There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another.
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Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are.
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Psychoanalysis will be entirely discredited one of these days, no doubt about it. Which will not keep it from destroying our last vestiges of naivete. After psychoanalysis, we can never again be innocent.
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I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person.
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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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Reality is a creation of our excesses.
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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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Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
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There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
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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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If you don't want to explode with rage, leave your memory alone, abstain from burrowing there.
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Nothing is indefensible - from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime.
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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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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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One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.
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Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
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Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
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Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.
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I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide...
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If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame.
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Try to be free: you will die of hunger.
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I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
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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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Everyone must destroy their life. According to the way they do it, they're either triumphants or failures.