Emil Cioran Quotes
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We replace God as best we can; for every god is good, provided he perpetuates in eternity our desire for a crucial solitude...
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Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?
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The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them.
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Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.
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All morning, I did nothing but repeat: 'Man is an abyss, man is an abyss.' - I could not, alas, find anything better.
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The Creation was the first act of sabotage.
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Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth...
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Buddhism calls anger 'corruption of the mind,' Manicheism 'root of the tree of death.' I know this, but what good does it do me to know?
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To hope is to contradict the future.
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Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.
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Existing is plagiarism.
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Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?
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We regret not having the courage to make such and such decision; we regret much more having made one - any one. Better no action than the consequences of an action.
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What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.
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Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.
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Word - that invisible dagger.
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What are you waiting for in order to give up?
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We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.
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Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.
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No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.