Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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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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One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.
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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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Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.
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The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.
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I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.
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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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Thanks to depression - that alpinism of the indolent - we scale every summit and daydream over every precipice from our bed.
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Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
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They ask you for facts, proofs, works, and all you can show them are transformed tears.
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Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.
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I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
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When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment.
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Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.
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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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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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Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.
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Try to be free: you will die of hunger.
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To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life.
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We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone 'happy', no greater flattery than to grant him a 'vein of melancholy'... This is because gaiety is link to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.
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I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.
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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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One disgust, then another - to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind...The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive.