Quotes from Emil Cioran

Cînd nu te mai simti deloc om si continui totusi a iubi, contradictia se mareste într-o suferinta nespusa, infernala.

Cînd zaresc cerul, îmi vine sa ma dizolv în el, iar cînd privesc pamîntul, sa ma îngrop în maruntaiele lui.

God does not read.

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing.

Fiecare clip? este o groap?, neîndestul?tor de adânc?.

Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.

Sunt prea trist spre a fi n?scut pentru iubire!

In the days when I set off on month-long bicycle trips across France, my greatest pleasure was to stop in country cemeteries, to stretch out between two graves, and to smoke for hours on end. I think of those days as the most active period of my life.

When you meditate all day on the inopportuneness of birth, everything you plan and everything you perform seems pathetic, futile. You are like a madman who, cured, does nothing but think of the crisis from which he has emerged, the "dream" he has left behind; he keeps harking back to it, so that his cure is of no benefit to him whatever.

I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.

Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.

It is no sign of benediction to have been obsessed with the lives of saints, for it is an obsession intertwined with a taste for maladies and hunger for depravities. One only troubles oneself with saints because one has been disappointed by the paradoxes of earthly life; one therefore searches out other paradoxes, more outlandish in guise, redolent of unknown truths, unknown perfumes...

No one is responsible for what he is nor even for what he does. This is obvious and everyone more or less agrees that it is so. Then why celebrate or denigrate? Because to exist is to evaluate, to emit judgments, and because abstention, when it is not the effect of apathy or cowardice, requires an effort no one manages to make.

Melancholy is a kind of boredom refined, the feeling that one does not belong to this world. It's a sensation of irremediable exile, without immediate cause. Melancholy is a feeling deeply autonomous, also independent of the failure of those great personal successes. Nostalgia, on the contrary, still clings to something, even if it is only to the past.

There are people to whom gain is unimportant, who are hopelessly unhappy and lonely.

A conscious fruit fly would have to confront exactly the same difficulties, the same kind of insoluble problems as man.

Frivolous, disconnected, an amateur at everything, I shall have known thoroughly only the disadvantage of having been born.

If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?

Shakespeare et Dostoievski font persister en vous le regret de n'etre pas un saint ou un criminel. Ces deux manieres de s'autodetruire...

Le même sentiment d'inappartenance, de jeu inutile, où que j'aille : je feins de m'intéresser à ce qui ne m'importe guère, je me trémousse par automatisme ou par charité, sans jamais être dans le coup, sans jamais être quelque part. Ce qui m'attire est ailleurs, et cet ailleurs je ne sais ce qu'il est.

All knowledge pushed to its limit can be dangerous, and morbid, because life is endurable solely because we don't see it through to the end. An undertaking is only possible if we have conserved a minimum of illusions. Complete lucidity is the void!

In all the edifices of thought, I have found no category on which to rest my head. Whereas Chaos—there's a pillow!

We tell our troubles to someone only to make him suffer, to make him assume them for himself. If we wanted to win him over, we would admit none but abstract worries, the only kind those who love us are eager to hear.