Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn't deserve to be known.
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One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.
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'Do I look like someone who has something to do here on Earth?' - That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.
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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 define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.
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Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world.
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A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints.
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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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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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One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.
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We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
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There is no false sensation.
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I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.
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One should live and die where one was born... I've been bored everywhere I went. What was the point of leaving Coasta Boacu?
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Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.
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I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which has spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations.
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Creation is in fact a fault, man’s famous sin thereby appearing as a minor version of a much graver one. What are we guilty of, except of having followed, more or less slavishly, the Creator’s example? Easy to recognize in ourselves the fatality which was His: not for nothing have we issued from the hands of a wicked and woebegone god, a god accursed.
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The universal view melts things into a blur.
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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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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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Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!
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Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.
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Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.