Emil Cioran Quotes
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This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique - and insignificant.
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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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Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
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In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
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Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.
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By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
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Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
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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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The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It’s not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.
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It is not by genius, it is by suffering, and suffering alone, that one ceases to be a marionette.
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A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
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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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He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.
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Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
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If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!
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Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.
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Irons and the unbreathable air of this world strip us of everything, except the freedom to kill ourselves; and this freedom grants us a strength and pride to triumph over the loads which overwhelm us.
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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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When you love someone, you hope - the more closely to be attached - that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.
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There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.
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Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves - that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it.
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I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide.
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A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse.
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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.