Emil Cioran Quotes
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For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
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Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
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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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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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When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.
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History proves nothing because it contains everything.
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In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
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We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
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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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His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.
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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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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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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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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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Born in a prison, with burdens on our shoulders and our thoughts, we could not reach the end of a single day if the possibilities of ending it all did not incite us to begin the next day all over again.
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The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave’s virtue.
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Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again.
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In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.
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To have grazed every form of failure, including success.
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We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
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However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; - unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them...The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.
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One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.
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Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!