Quotes from Emil Cioran

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.

We derive our vitality from our store of madness.

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.

Everything is pathology, except for indifference.

The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.

One should live and die where one was born... I've been bored everywhere I went. What was the point of leaving Coasta Boacu?

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel you are consubstantial with that future.

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

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?

I don't understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn't it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?

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

Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

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

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.