Quotes from Emil M. Cioran

All thinkers are failures of action who avenge their failure by means of concepts.

The Empire was falling, the Barbarians were on the move.... What was to be done, except to escape the age? Happy moment, when there is still somewhere to go, when the empty places were accessible and welcoming! We have been dispossessed of everything, even the desert.

All twilights are on my side.

A man who trembles dreams of making others tremble, a man who lives in terror ends his days in ferocity. Hence the case of the Roman emperors.

Revolutions is a sublime of bad literature.

If the Jews have not inflicted Him upon us, they nevertheless bear the responsibility of having conceived Him. That is a flaw in their genius. They could have done better.

What is known as "wisdom" is ultimately only a perpetual "thinking it over," i.e., non-action as first impulse.

It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

for it is likely that the apogee of metaphysical torment is to be located well before that universal insipidity which followed the advent of Philosophy.

Knowledge – if it is profound – never changes: only its décor varies. Love continues without Venus, was without Mars, and if the gods no longer intervene in events, those events are neither more explicable nor less disconcerting: the paraphernalia of formulas merely replaces the pomp of the old legends, without the constants of human life being thereby modified, science apprehending them no more intimately than poetic narratives.

L'histoire est une leçon d'inhumanité. Pas une goutte de sang du passé ne peut troubler le présent où je suis.

The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their lives a meaning.

I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.

To be a Raskolnikov — without the excuse of murder.

So long as there is a single god standing, man's task is not done.

Every tormented "Occidental" suggests a Dostoyevskian hero with a bank account.

Not to have been born, merely musing on that—what happiness, what freedom, what space!

Death reaches so far, requires so much room, that I no longer know where to die.

To suffer: sole modality of acquiring the sensation of existence; to exist: unique means of safeguarding our destruction.

Za?o?y? rodzin?. My?l?, ?e ?atwiej by mi przysz?o za?o?y? imperium.

A strange island, the ghetto, a tiny universe without roots, to the measure of its inhabitants, as remote from the life of the soil as angels or ghosts.

The intrinsic value of a book does not depend on the importance of its subject (else the theologians would prevail, and mightily), but on the manner of approaching the accidental and the insignificant, of mastering the infinitesimal. The essential has never required the least talent.

Misfits … It seems to me that their adventure, more than any other, sheds a light on the future, that they alone allow us to glimpse and to decipher it, and that if we set their exploits aside we utterly disqualify ourselves from describing the days to come.

Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.