Emil Cioran Quotes
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It is unjust to call imaginary the diseases which are, on the contrary, only too real, since they proceed from our mind, the only regulator of our equilibrium and our health.
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As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?
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Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.
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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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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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Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
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There is not much difference between a mortal man and a dying man. The absurdity of making plans is only slightly more obvious in the second case.
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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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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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They ask you for facts, proofs, works, and all you can show them are transformed tears.
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The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy.
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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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No longer ask me for my program: isn't breathing one?
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He who hates himself is not humble.
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Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
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How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.
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I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
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To try curing someone of a 'vice,' of what is the deepest thing he has, is to attack his very being, and this is indeed how he himself understands it, since he will never forgive you for wanting him to destroy himself in your way and not his.
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No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.
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If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.
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That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.
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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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The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.
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Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.