Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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'You really should come to the house - one of these days we might die without having seen each other again.' - 'Since we have to die in any case, what's the use of seeing each other again?'
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You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness.
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Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence.
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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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Endless brooding over a question undermines you as much as a dull pain.
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How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.
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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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Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.
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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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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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Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?
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The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy.
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All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.
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Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.
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Tears do not burn except in solitude.
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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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We always love...despite; and that 'despite' covers an infinity.
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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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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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To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.
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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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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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That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.