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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No longer ask me for my program: isn't breathing one?
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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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All philosophers should end their days at Pythia’s feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.
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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 worst is not ennui nor despair but their encounter, their collision. To be crushed between the two!
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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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Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.
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Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence.
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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 saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.
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Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.
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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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No one has the audacity to exclaim: 'I don’t want to do anything!' -we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions.
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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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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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Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
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If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: "I want to be praised."
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Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation.
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There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.
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Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.
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I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.
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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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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.