Emil Cioran Quotes
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When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, 'What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act.' And they do calm down.
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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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Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.
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Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?
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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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Sadness makes you God's prisoner.
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To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.
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Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
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Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious.
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To be or not to be...Neither one nor the other.
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Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.
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By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let 'desire' be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.
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In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future.
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I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.
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Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.
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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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Hope is the normal form of delirium.
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Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.
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There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books.
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I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.
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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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Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what-it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?
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Skepticism is an exercise in defascination.
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Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!