Emil Cioran Quotes
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Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.
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To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.
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Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!
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Self-knowledge - the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?
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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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We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die. - Didn't you know that's how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?
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Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?
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One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.
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My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.
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To fear is to die every minute.
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To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.
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Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.
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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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In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart. Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.
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Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?
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I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.
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The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
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On the frontiers of the self: 'What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I.'
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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 more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.
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Hope is the normal form of delirium.
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By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
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To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion.
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Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.