Quotes from Emil Cioran

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

Under each formula lies a corpse.

We inhabit a language rather than a country.

A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...

True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.

Man is a robot with defects.

We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering

There is no limit to suffering.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with our kind: the more we practice it, the more we become like everyone else: it is in the performance of a reputedly bestial function that we prove our status as citizens: nothing is more public than the sexual act.

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.

Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise.

We derive our vitality from our store of madness.

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

When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What's your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act." And they do calm down.

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

To have committed every crime but that of being a father.

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.

Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are.

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.

To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.

Read day and night, devour books—these sleeping pills—not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.