Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.
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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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Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.
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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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Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.
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Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
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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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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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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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Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?
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I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.
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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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Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.
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If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
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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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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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We always love...despite; and that 'despite' covers an infinity.
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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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All that is Life in me urges me to give up God.
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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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The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.
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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.