Emil Cioran Quotes
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The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness.
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It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: in truth, it is itself the quintessence of injustice.
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Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.
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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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Though we may prefer ourselves to the universe, we nonetheless loathe ourselves much more than we suspect. If the wise man is so rare a phenomenon, it is because he seems unshaken by the aversion which, like all beings, he must feel for himself.
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As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.
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I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide...
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I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
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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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A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
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Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?
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There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another.
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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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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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Revenge is not always sweet: once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
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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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I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.
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After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?
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The wrinkles of a nation are as visible as those of an individual.
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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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We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
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If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.
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Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.
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How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.