Quotes from Emil Cioran

I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.

I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.

I would like to be free, totaly free... free like an aborted child.

We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.

Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.

This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this, and I do not. Everything is unique—and insignificant.

Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.

Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

How I wish I didn't know anything about myself and this world!

Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.

Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.

There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.

There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.

As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.

Sînt unii oameni atît de prosti, ca de le-ar aparea vreo idee la suprafata creierului ea s-ar sinucide din groaza de singuratate.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.

The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.

Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.

We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.