Emil Cioran Quotes
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Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.
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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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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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If I used to ask myself, over a coffin, 'what good did it do the occupant to be born?' I now put the same question about anyone alive.
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I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide...
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As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?
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Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.
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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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The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.
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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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Though we may prefer ourselves to the universe, we nonetheless loathe ourselves much more than we suspect. If the wise man is so rare a phenomenon, it is because he seems unshaken by the aversion which, like all beings, he must feel for himself.
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The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.
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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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He who hates himself is not humble.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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We always love...despite; and that 'despite' covers an infinity.
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Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.