Emil Cioran Quotes
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I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.
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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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To fear is to die every minute.
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Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.
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'What's wrong - what's the matter with you?' Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for...
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When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.
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Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don’t know, and we don’t really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.
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The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so...
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Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
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What place do we occupy in the 'universe'? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we are evidently so insignificant? Once we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.
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Only thoughts that are randomly born die. The other thoughts we carry with us without knowing them. They have abandoned themselves to forgetfulness so that they can be with us all the time.
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The need to devour oneself absolves one of the need to believe.
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However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.
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Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?
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When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years.
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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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Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.
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Thought is as much a lie as love or faith.
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If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.
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The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
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Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
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Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what’s the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?
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To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously.
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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?