Quotes from Emil Cioran

En un mundo sin melancolía, los ruiseñores se pondrían a eructar.

Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself.

Why don't I kill myself? If I knew exactly what keeps me from doing so, I should have no more questions to ask myself since I should have answered them all.

Cu cât înaintezi în via??, îÅ£i dai seama c? nimic nu înveÅ£i, ci regresezi în amintire. Este ca ÅŸi cum am imita o lume pe care am tr?it-o cândva.

Am avut mereu aceeasi obsesie, pe tema inutilit??ii si a mor?ii, celelalte probleme n-au nicio importan??.

Bitterness, principle of your determination, your mode of action, and understanding, is the one fixed point in your oscillation between disgust for the world and self-pity.

Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.

Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.

De câte ori lunec?m pe panta amintirilor, de atâtea ori suferim din cauza vieÈ›ii.

Nu pot fi fericiÅ£i decât oamenii care nu gândesc nimic, adic? aceia care gândesc numai cât trebuie vieÅ£ii.

A fi plin de tine insuti nu in sens de orgoliu ci de bogatie a fi chinuit de o infinitate interna si de o tensiune extrema inseamna a trai cu atata intensitate incat simti cum mori din cauza vietii.

I have no ideas, only obsessions. Anybody can have ideas. Ideas have never caused anybody's downfall.

The "west"-what curse has fallen upon it that at the term of its trajectory it produces only these businessmen, these shopkeepers, these racketeers with their blank stares and atrophied smiles... is it with such vermin as this that a civilization so delicate and so complex must come to an end?

What they ask you for is actions, proofs, works, and all you can produce are transformed tears.

Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture…

Time, fertile in resources, more inventive and more charitable than we think, possesses a remarkable capacity to help us out, to afford us at any hour of the day some new humiliation.

After each night we are emptier: our mysteries and our griefs have leaked away into our dreams. Thus sleep's labor not only diminishes the power of our thought, but even that of our secrets.

In Buddhist writings, mention is often made of "the abyss of birth." An abyss indeed, a gulf into which we do not fall but from which, instead, we emerge, to our universal chagrin.

Explosive force of any mortification. Every vanquished desire affords us power. We have the more hold over this world the further we withdraw from it, the less we adhere to it. Renunciation confers an infinite power.

My disappointments, instead of converging toward a center and constituting if not a system at least an ensemble, are scattered, each supposed itself unique and thereby wasted, lacking organization.

We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.

Each time I have a lapse of memory, I think of the anguish which must afflict those who know they no longer remember anything. But something tells me that after a certain time a secret joy possesses them, a joy they would not agree to trade for any of their memories, even the most stirring. …

Plictiseala? O convalescenta incurabila.

To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously.