Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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Endless brooding over a question undermines you as much as a dull pain.
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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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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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Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.
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All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.
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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 had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy.
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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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I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.
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To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.
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The mind advances only when it has the patience to go in circles, in other words, to deepen.
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How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.
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Tears do not burn except in solitude.
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What is not heartrending is superfluous, at least in music.
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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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That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.
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To try curing someone of a 'vice,' of what is the deepest thing he has, is to attack his very being, and this is indeed how he himself understands it, since he will never forgive you for wanting him to destroy himself in your way and not his.
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There is not much difference between a mortal man and a dying man. The absurdity of making plans is only slightly more obvious in the second case.
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By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.
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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.
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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?