Quotes from Emil M. Cioran

When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.

no man concerned with his own equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.

I seriously ask myself, What is the meaning of all this? Why raise questions, throw lights, or see shadows? Wouldn't it be better if I buried my tears in the sand on a seashore in utter solitude? But I never cried, because my tears have always turned into thoughts. And my thoughts are as bitter as tears.

Nobody is comforted in his sufferings by the thought we are all mortals, nor does anybody who suffers really find comfort in the past or present suffering of others.

We are enriched only by frequenting disciplines remote from our own.

Silence," he would say, "brings man closer to God and makes him, on earth, like unto the angels.

A r?mâne cu mintea întreag? e un privilegiu ce ne poate fi retras.

Old age is nature's self-criticism.

but let us remember that lucidity is a condition peculiar to those who by their incapacity to love are as isolated from others as from themselves.

If I have been able to hold out till now, it is because each blow, which seemed intolerable at the time, was followed by a second which was worse

Entirely independent of our intellectual system, death, like every individual experience, can be confronted only by knowledge without information

Two enemies—the same man divided.

To exist is to profit by our share of unreality, to be quickened by each contact with the void that is within.

In anxiety, a man clings to whatever can reinforce, can stimulate his providential discomfort

Why do men insist on achieving something? Would it not be better if they stood still under the sun in calm and silent immobility? What is there to accomplish? Why so much effort and ambition? Man has forgotten the meaning of silence.

The wise man consents to everything, for he identifies himself with nothing. An opportunist without desires.

knows it is necessary, knows that we cannot do without anxiety once we have known it.

El hombre ha hecho de la actividad un principio de destrucción más que de creación. Ha convertido la laboriosidad en desgracia, el trabajo en mal y la prisa en maldición. El hombre es una hormiga bestial.

Todo lo que no tiende a la pureza de la nada está embebido de una feroz vulgaridad

feeling of being everything and the evidence of being nothing.' I happened across this phrase in my youth, and was overwhelmed by it. Everything I felt in those days, and everything I would feel from then on, was summed up in this extraordinary banal formula, the synthesis of expansion and failure, ecstasy and impasse. Most often it is not in a paradox but in a truism that a revelation appears.

If we did not bear the stigmata of life, how easy it would be to steal away, and how well everything would go by itself!

We understand what death is only by suddenly remembering the face of someone who has been a matter of indifference to us.

Better than anyone I am able to forgive on the spot. My desire for revenge comes late, too late, when memory of the offense is fading and when, the incitation to action having become virtually nonexistent, I have only one recourse: to deplore my 'good feelings'.

The roads to heaven have been worn smooth by all the erring instincts. Indeed, heaven was born of these errors.