Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.
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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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How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.
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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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Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
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Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with our kind: the more we practice it, the more we become like everyone else: it is in the performance of a reputedly bestial function that we prove our status as citizens: nothing is more public than the sexual act.
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I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.
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Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.
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Try as I will, I don't see what might exist...
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To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life.
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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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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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The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.
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Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.
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Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?
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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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Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself - there is no wish I make more often.
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We always love...despite; and that 'despite' covers an infinity.
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If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
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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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Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.
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The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world.
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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.