Emil Cioran Quotes
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Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
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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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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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To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.
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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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This world was created from God's fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator. Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we live dramas for the boredom of a spectator, whose claps have never reached the ears of a mortal.
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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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We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
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What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!
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Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!
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The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity…
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Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
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From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.
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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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The need to devour oneself absolves one of the need to believe.
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If I were to go blind, what would bother me the most would be no longer to be able to stare idiotically at the passing clouds.
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Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands?
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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.
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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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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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To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!
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Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.
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There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.