Emil Cioran Quotes
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To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze.
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Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.
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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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Try as I will, I don't see what might exist...
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I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
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How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.
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Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.
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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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Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
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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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All that is Life in me urges me to give up God.
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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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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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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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I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.
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Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.
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The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.
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By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.
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Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.
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Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.
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Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself - there is no wish I make more often.
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Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.
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Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves.
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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.