Emil Cioran Quotes
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We always love...despite; and that 'despite' covers an infinity.
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Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.
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Tears do not burn except in solitude.
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The farther men get from God, the farther they advance into the knowledge of religions.
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Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.
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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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Our first intuitions are the true ones.
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To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!
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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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Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?
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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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If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.
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We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
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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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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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All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.
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It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false.
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Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.
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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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The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.
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To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.
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Endless brooding over a question undermines you as much as a dull pain.
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The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable.
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You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness.