Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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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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The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.
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What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!
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I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.
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Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.
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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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The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.
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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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Revenge is not always sweet: once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
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Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.
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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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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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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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The wrinkles of a nation are as visible as those of an individual.
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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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Without its assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation?
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I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide...
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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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No longer ask me for my program: isn't breathing one?
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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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Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.