Emil Cioran Quotes
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The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the 'meaning' of life.
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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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The wrinkles of a nation are as visible as those of an individual.
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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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Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.
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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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If I used to ask myself, over a coffin, 'what good did it do the occupant to be born?' I now put the same question about anyone alive.
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Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.
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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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Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret.
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To be is to be cornered.
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Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.
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It is unjust to call imaginary the diseases which are, on the contrary, only too real, since they proceed from our mind, the only regulator of our equilibrium and our health.
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I am for the most part so convinced that everything is lacking in basis, consequence, justification, that if someone dared to contradict me, even the man I most admire, he would seem to me a charlatan or a fool.
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Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.
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Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are.
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Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.
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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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Eternity is absence.
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The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.
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Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
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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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Revenge is not always sweet: once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.