Quotes from Emile Cioran

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us theirs?

It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: In truth it is itself the quintessence of injustice.

Una poesía digna de ese nombre comienza por la experiencia de la fatalidad. Sólo los malos poetas son libres.

Modelos de estilo: el juramento, el telegrama y el epitafio.

Ambition is a drug that turns it's addicts into potential madmen.

Meeting, after several years, someone we used to know as a child, the first glance almost always suggests that some great disaster must have befallen him

Hacia una sabiduría vegetal: abjuraría de todos mis terrores por la sonrisa de un árbol...

a golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.

The only successful philosophies and religions are the ones that flatter us, whether in the name of progress or of hell. Damned or not, man experiences an absolute need to be at the heart of everything.

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.

Since we all believe that our merits are misunderstood or flouted, how admit that so general an iniquity could be the doing of mere man? It must go back further and belong to some ancient dirty work, to the very act of the Creation. Thus we know whom to blame, whom to disparage: nothing flatters and sustains us so much as being able to put the source of our indignity as far away from us as possible.