Emil Cioran Quotes
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Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.
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The wrinkles of a nation are as visible as those of an individual.
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Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret.
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Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.
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There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
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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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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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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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Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are.
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Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.
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Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.
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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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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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Without its assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation?
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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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To be is to be cornered.
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Try to be free: you will die of hunger.
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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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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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To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire.
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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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Everyone must destroy their life. According to the way they do it, they're either triumphants or failures.
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Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
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Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.