Quotes from Emil Cioran

Totul e înghetat si tu esti risipitor de zîmbete.

To tell the truth, I couldn't care less about the relativity of knowledge, simply because the world does not deserve to be known.

I've never practiced a profession and have lived like a sort of student. I consider this my greatest success, my life hasn't been a failure because I succeeded in doing nothing.

I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.

The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It's not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.

No one reads to know, but to forget

I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide...

There is a whole range of melancholy: it begins with a smile and a landscape and ends with the clang of a broken bell in the soul

Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded a complete failure.

The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable. The great solitaries were happy in the old days, knew nothing of duplicity, had nothing to hide: they conversed only with their own solitude.

I have recommended you the dignity of skepticism: yet here I am, prowling around the Absolute. Technique of contradiction? Remember, rather, what Flaubert said: "I am a mystic and I believe in nothing".

I was walking late one night along a tree-lined path; a chestnut fell at my feet. The noise it made as it burst, the resonance it provoked in me, and an upheaval out of all proportion to this insignificant event thrust me into miracle, into the rapture of the definitive, as if there were no more questions—only answers. I was drunk on a thousand unexpected discoveries, none of which I could make use of. … This is how I nearly reached the Supreme. But instead I went on with my walk.

Only the mediocre want to die of old age. Suffer, then, drink pleasure to its last dregs, cry or laugh, scream in despair or with joy, sing about death or love, for nothing will endure! Morality can only make life a long series of missed opportunities.

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

If the waves were to start thinking, they would believe that they are moving forward, that they have a purpose, that they are working for the good of the sea, and they wouldn't fail to work out a philosophy as inane as their zeal.

Si atunci regreti de-a nu fi cunoscut mai multe iluzii pentru a te legana în amarul absentei lor.

Un zîmbet inepuizabil, pe spatiul unei lacrimi...

Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation

Our power resides in our incapacity to know how alone we are.

Once I had a "self"; now I am no more than an object.

Tolerance cannot seduce the young.

The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is somewhere else, and I don't know what that elsewhere is.

No one has lived so close to his skeleton as I have lived to mine: from which results an endless dialogue and certain truths which I manage neither to accept nor to reject.

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