Emile M. Cioran Quotes

The universal view melts things into a blur.

There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.

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.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?

How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history - greater than the fall of empires - I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

We change ideas like neckties.

Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.

Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?

I am the beast with a contorted grin, contracting down to illusion and dilating toward infinity, both growing and dying, delightfully suspended between hope for nothing and despair of everything, brought up among perfumes and poisons, consumed with love and hatred, killed by lights and shadows. My symbol is death of light and the flame of death. Sparks die in me only to be reborn as thunder and lightning. Darkness itself glows in me.

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.

I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.

How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.

It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.

Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.

The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.

How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.

In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.

The curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing now but mask and ghost.

History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.

To accomplish nothing and die of the strain

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

To live... in any sense of the word... is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence.

What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself.

Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.

Hungarian Language — savage it may be but of a beauty that has nothing human about it, with sonorities of another universe, powerful and corrosive, appropriate to prayer, to groans and to tears, risen out of hell to perpetuate its accent and its aura…words of nectar and cyanide.

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false

I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.

Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone.

Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.