Emil Cioran Quotes
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I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
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I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.
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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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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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Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
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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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To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing
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Try to be free: you will die of hunger.
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The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.
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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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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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How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.
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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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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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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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I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide...
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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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Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.
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They ask you for facts, proofs, works, and all you can show them are transformed tears.
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Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.
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History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.
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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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Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
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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.