Emil Cioran Quotes
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Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.
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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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The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.
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If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.
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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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Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
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How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.
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Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.
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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 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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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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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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That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.
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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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The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.
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They ask you for facts, proofs, works, and all you can show them are transformed tears.
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Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
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I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
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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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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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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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The farther men get from God, the farther they advance into the knowledge of religions.