Quotes from Emil Cioran

Memories vanish when we want to remember, but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget.

For animals, life is all there is; for man, life is a question mark. An irreversible question mark, for man has never found, nor will ever find, any answers. Life not only has no meaning; it can never have one.

Between the demand to be clear,and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect.

Eu nu am idei ci obsesii. Idei poate avea oricine. Nimeni nu s-a pr?bu?it din cauza ideilor.

Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded as a complete failure. Without Bach, God would be a complete second-rate figure.

A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society

I have all the defects of other people and yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.

Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.

We must learn how to explode! Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage.

We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job...

Cât? via?? ai pus în gânduri, atâta moarte este în tine.

Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?

To accomplish nothing and die of the strain

I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.

How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.

I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.

I have always struggled, with the sole intention of ceasing to struggle. Result: zero.

If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.

To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!

Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do. One so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it.

For a long while I have lived with the notion that I was the most normal being that ever existed. This notion gave me the taste, even the passion for being unproductive: what was the use of being prized in a world inhabited by madmen, a world mired in mania and stupidity? For whom was one to bother, and to what end? It remains to be seen if I have quite freed myself from this certitude, salvation in the absolute, ruin in the immediate.

While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning how to play a new tune on the flute. "What will be the use of that?" he was asked. "To know this tune before dying." If I dare repeat this reply long since trivialized by the handbooks, it is because it seems to me the sole serious justification of any desire to know, whether exercised on the brink of death or at any other moment of existence.