Emil Cioran Quotes
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I seem to myself, among civilised men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.
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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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As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.
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Hope is the normal form of delirium.
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I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.
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Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what’s the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?
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If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?
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Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.
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Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.
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As soon as one returns to Doubt (if it could be said that one has ever left it), undertaking anything at all seems not so much useless as extravagant. Doubt works deep within you like a disease, or even more effectively, like a faith.
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Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.
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Who does not believe in Fate proves that he has not lived.
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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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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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We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
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We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.
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If someone incessantly drops the word 'life,' you know he's a sick man.
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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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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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Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.
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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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To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion.
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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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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.