Quotes from E M Cioran

Not knowing humiliation, you are ignorant of what it is to arrive at the last stage of yourself.

Emptiness is consciousness itself.

Wherever I go, my evils accompany me. That is the capital gift of my existence.

By the moon, I suddenly realized how much I was tied to this beautiful and damned universe.

Lying down, I close my eyes.  I see an abyss that opens vertiginously, like an endless pit that deepens, looking into a kind of uncontrollable water, which widens itself with hallucinatory speed, and I'm dragged into this movement; delirium of simplest cosmogony, a birth-giving abyss indefinitely itself.

Those moments where we have a terrible desire to be alone, because we are confident that, face to face with ourselves, we will be able to find and express strange, unique things, unheard; and then disappointment as great as our hopes, when one is alone at last and nothing comes out of that loneliness as expected.

I promise myself, once back in Paris, to write every day at least a page about anything, if only to keep my spirit on alert.

If there's one thing I really distinguish in myself, it's my unlimited ability for getting tired of everything.

Having genius means to digest influences while losing all footprint and trace of them.

I've lived too long as a parasite of my moods.)

Nobody has the right to say what he really thinks of an author unless they admire his work.

Perhaps it was in order to be saved, that Adam did what he did. He feared his ruin, the happiness.

In the landscapes we love, our weaknesses take on another aspect.

I've spent all day in bed. Having the old obsessions, the feeling that nothing is possible for me.

I have not met any enjoyment I have not had to expiate one way or another.

The heat brings to the surface all my weaknesses.

My first thought when jumping out of bed in the middle of the night was going to throw myself into the sea from the cliff top.

I've been going for walks.  Shore of the sea, accompanied by the most somber thoughts. And if I throw myself from the top of a cliff?

I feel I am free but I know I am not.