Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing
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Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream.
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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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Without will, no conflict: no tragedy among the abulic. Yet the failure of will can be experienced more painfully than a tragic destiny.
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Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.
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Only optimists commit suicide, the optimists who can no longer be...optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?
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Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.
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Hungarian Language — savage it may be but of a beauty that has nothing human about it, with sonorities of another universe, powerful and corrosive, appropriate to prayer, to groans and to tears, risen out of hell to perpetuate its accent and its aura…words of nectar and cyanide.
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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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The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.
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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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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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Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.
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One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.
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Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.
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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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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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There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.
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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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A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
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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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Thanks to depression - that alpinism of the indolent - we scale every summit and daydream over every precipice from our bed.
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To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire.