Emil Cioran Quotes
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The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.
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I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.
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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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Nothing surpasses the pleasures of idleness: even if the end of the world were to come, I would not leave my bed at an ungodly hour.
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To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze.
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Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.
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The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.
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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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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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Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.
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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 we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.
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Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.
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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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'You really should come to the house - one of these days we might die without having seen each other again.' - 'Since we have to die in any case, what's the use of seeing each other again?'
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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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To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!
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Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence.
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Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
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Try as I will, I don't see what might exist...
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You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness.
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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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How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history - greater than the fall of empires - I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.
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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.