Quotes from Emil Cioran

În somn uiÈ›i drama vieÈ›ii tale, uiÈ›i complicaÈ›iile È™i obsesiile aÈ™a încât fiecare deÈ™teptare este un început nou de via??, este o speran?? nou?. ViaÈ›a p?streaz? astfel o discontinuitate pl?cut? care d? impresia unei continue regener?ri a unei renaÈ™teri permanente.

Cînd esti iubit, suferi mai mult decît cînd nu esti. Parasit, te mîngîi prin orgoliu; dar ce consolare mai poti nascoci în fata unei inimi ce ti se deschide?

I am for the most part so convinced that everything is lacking in basis, consequence, justification, that if someone dared to contradict me, even the man I most admire, he would seem to me a charlatan or a fool.

A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.

As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.

Without the idea of suicide I would have surely killed myself.

Personal imi dau demisia din omenire.

As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad . . .

If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.

Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

De ce un singuratic simte mai mult? Fiindca singuratatea-i suferinta.

My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out. I am a fossil dating from the beginning of the world: not all of its elements have completely crystallized, and initial chaos still shows through. I am absolute contradiction, climax of antinomies, the last limit of tension; in me anything is possible, for I am he who at the supreme moment, in front of absolute nothingness, will laugh.

It is no nation that we inhabit, but a language. Make no mistake; our native toungue is our true fatherland.

O existenta care nu ascunde o mare nebunie n-are nicio valoare.

At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j'ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.

Oamenii la care ne gîndim dintr-o dat?, f?r? motiv aparent, sînt cei care ne-au flatat ori ne-au umilit într-un moment sau altul al existenÅ£ei noastre. Sînt singurii de care ne amintim dup? ani, chiar ÅŸi atunci cînd au disp?rut de tot din orizontul nostru.

Nothing more to pursue, except the pursuit of nothing.

I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass—which is better than trying to fill them.

It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.

Dragostea fiind o întîlnire dureroasa si paradoxala a fericirii cu disperarea, el e prea neîncapator excesului ei inuman. De aceea, de cîte ori te trezesti din iubire, pare ca ti-a putrezit timpul prin nu mai stiu ce inima.

The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

To live in any true sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must be able to renounce, to do oneself violence, to act against one's own nature, to weaken oneself; we conceive freedom only for ourselves - we extend it to our neighbours only at the cost of exhausting efforts; whence the precariousness of liberalism, a defiance of our instincts, a brief and miraculous success, a state of exception, at the antipodes of our deepest imperatives.