Emil Cioran Quotes
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The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.
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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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Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.
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The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.
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He who hates himself is not humble.
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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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Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.
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I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.
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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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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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The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness.
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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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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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Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
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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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All that is Life in me urges me to give up God.
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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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Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
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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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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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We always love...despite; and that 'despite' covers an infinity.
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No longer ask me for my program: isn't breathing one?
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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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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.