Emil Cioran Quotes
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We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
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The real, the unique misfortune: to see the light of day. A disaster which dates back to aggressiveness, to the seed of expansion and rage within origins, to the tendency to the worst which first shook them up.
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I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.
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As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.
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In order to deceive melancholy, you must keep moving. Once you stop, it wakens, if in fact it has ever dozed off.
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What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.
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Of all calumnies the worst is the one which attacks our indolence, which contests its authenticity.
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To dream of an enterprise of demolition that would spare none of the traces of the original Big Bang.
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Who does not believe in Fate proves that he has not lived.
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I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.
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Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.
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We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.
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We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
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In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left...with a foolish grin.
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Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.
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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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Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.
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Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
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We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false.
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When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, 'What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act.' And they do calm down.
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Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn't deserve to be known.
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The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?
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For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.
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I seem to myself, among civilised men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.