Emil Cioran Quotes
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I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.
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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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Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.
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He who hates himself is not humble.
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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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How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.
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All that is Life in me urges me to give up God.
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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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Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.
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How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.
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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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Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
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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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Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.
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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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The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.
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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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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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Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.
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We always love...despite; and that 'despite' covers an infinity.
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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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Tears do not burn except in solitude.
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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."