Emil Cioran Quotes
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Revenge is not always sweet: once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
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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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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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Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.
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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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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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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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There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.
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The moment we believe we've understood everything grants us the look of a murderer.
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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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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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Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.
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A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
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The farther men get from God, the farther they advance into the knowledge of religions.
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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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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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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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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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Without its assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation?
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No longer ask me for my program: isn't breathing one?
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How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.
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Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.