Quotes from Emile M. Cioran

To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life.

A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It's not easy to be on the wrong foot with life.

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

Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.

We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.

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

Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.

Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.

Transmitting one's flaws [through procreation] to someone else is a crime. I could never consent to give life to someone who would inherent my ailments.

If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.

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.

My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.

We cannot be normal and alive at the same time.

What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?

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

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

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.

To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible to act is to feel you are consubstantial with that future.

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.

Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.

Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.

To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.