Emil Cioran Quotes
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What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.
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Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
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You have dreamed of setting the world ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light up a single one!
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Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.
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So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.
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The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character - precisely that and nothing more.
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The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?
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Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
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Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!
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Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.
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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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What anxiety when one is not sure of one's doubts or wonders: are these actually doubts?
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The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools.
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We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
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When you love someone, you hope - the more closely to be attached - that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.
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There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.
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In a single second we do away with all seconds; God himself could not do as much.
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Of all that makes us suffer, nothing - so much as disappointment - gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.
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'What is truth?' is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to 'How to endure life?' And even this one pales beside the next: 'How to endure oneself?' - That is the crucial question in which no one is in a position to give us an answer.
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Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.
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It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.
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As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.
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In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
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Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes - desertion after desertion.