Quotes from Emil M. Cioran

Without God, everything is nothingness; and God? Supreme nothingness.

everything leads us to assume that man is the last caprice nature has allowed herself.

A civilization develops from agriculture to the paradox. Between these two extremities occurs the struggle between barbarism and neurosis: resulting in the unstable equilibrium of creative epochs. This struggle is reaching its end: All horizons are opening without any being able to excite a curiosity at once weary and awakened. It is then up to the disabused individual to flourish in the void, up to the intellectual vampire to lap up the tainted blood of civilizations.

Wherever civilized men appeared for the first time, they were regarded by the natives as devils, as ghosts, specters. Never as living men! Unequaled intuition, a prophetic insight, if ever there was one.

But we are fundamentally, biologically unsuited to "understand.

Once my body gives me the slip, how, I wonder, with such carrion on my hands, will I combat the capitulation of my organs?

he is not, like us, abnormal by accident or out of snobbery, but naturally, without effort, and by tradition: such is the advantage of an inspired destiny on the scale of a whole people.

Naiveté, optimism, generosity—we encounter them among botanists, specialists in the pure sciences, explorers, never among politicians, historians, or priests.

Each day is a Rubicon in which I aspire to be drowned.

They credited only their own prejudices, whence the accusation of "misanthropy," a crime imputed to them by Cicero, Seneca, Celsius, and, with them, all antiquity.

Have you suffered for knowledge?

The West is making progress, timidly sporting its senility — and already I feel less envy of those who, having seen Rome founder, believed they were enjoying a unique and intransmissible desolation.

The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity...

Ofiara muzyczna, Sztuka fugi, Wariacje Goldbergowskie: w muzyce, tak jak w filozofii i we wszystkim, lubiÄ™ to, co sprawia ból przez uporczywo??, nawracanie, przez nieskoÅ"czony powrót, który dotyka najdalszych gÅ'Ä™bi bytu i wywoÅ'uje ledwo mo?liwÄ… do zniesienia przyjemno??.

Did they relish their role as undesirables? Did they seek to be alone on earth in principle?

A man who has completely vanquished selfishness, who retains no trace of it whatever, cannot live longer than twenty-one days

I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity

Hercules was punished for having succeeded in all his undertakings. Similarly Troy, too happy, had to perish. Pondering this vision shared by the tragic poets, we cannot help thinking that the so-called free world, upon which every fortune has been lavished, will inevitably suffer Ilion's fate, for the jealousy of the gods survives their disappearance.

In my way I must be a fighter, since I have not succumbed to my ruminations.

We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life.

What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know what that elsewhere is.

When I lie awake far into the night, I am visited by my evil

my greatest pleasure was to stop in country cemeteries, to stretch out between two graves, and to smoke for hours on end.

Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?