Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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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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Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor and revolt, a perplexity on fire.
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He who hates himself is not humble.
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Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.
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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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All that is Life in me urges me to give up God.
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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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Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.
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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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No longer ask me for my program: isn't breathing one?
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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We always love...despite; and that 'despite' covers an infinity.
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If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: "I want to be praised."
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Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.
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Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.