Emil Cioran Quotes
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The skeptic is the least mysterious man in the world, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world.
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Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.
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The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
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Only those moments count when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than to exchange a word with someone.
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No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.
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We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.
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I am the beast with a contorted grin, contracting down to illusion and dilating toward infinity, both growing and dying, delightfully suspended between hope for nothing and despair of everything, brought up among perfumes and poisons, consumed with love and hatred, killed by lights and shadows. My symbol is death of light and the flame of death. Sparks die in me only to be reborn as thunder and lightning. Darkness itself glows in me.
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Why don't I kill myself? If I knew exactly what keeps me from doing so, I should have no more questions to ask myself since I should have answered them all.
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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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Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.
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Society: an inferno of saviors!
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The Art of Love: knowing how to combine the temperament of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone.
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If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.
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One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.
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I long to be free-desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.
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A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people.
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Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.
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A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints.
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I want to proclaim a truth that would forever exile me from among the living. I know only the conditions but not the words that would allow me to formulate it.
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To have grazed every form of failure, including success.
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If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.
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Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.
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To think is to run after insecurity, to be demoralized for grandiose trifles, to immure oneself in abstractions with a martyr's avidity, to hunt up complications the way others pursue collapse or gain. The thinker is by definition keen for torment.
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Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.