Quotes from Emil M. Cioran

The Captain was a peasant established in the Absolute.

Che umiliazione dover assistere all'estinzione dei nostri deliri! Dov'è il folle che ero?

Anyone may now and then have the sense of occupying only a point and a moment; to have such a sense day and night, hour by hour, is less frequent, and it is from this experience, this datum, that one turns toward nirvana or sarcasm--or toward both at once.

in order to dispel any impulse of vengeance once I had endured some affront, I would imagine myself quite still in my grave. And I calmed down at once.

At twenty, those nights when for hours at a time I would stand, forehead pressed against the pane, staring into the dark. . . .

Each of us takes on himself that unit of disaster which is the phenomenon man. And the only meaning time has is to multiply these units, endlessly to enlarge these vertical sufferings which depend upon a nonentity of matter, upon the pride of a given name, and upon a solitude without appeal.

Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion. — Emil M. Cioran, Tears and Saints . (University Of Chicago Press; Reprint edition July 6, 1998) Originally published 1937.

Ennui is the martyrdom for those who live and die for no belief

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on.

Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage.

The worst reproach to be made against police states is that they oblige—for prudence's sake—the destruction of letters and diaries, i.e., what is least false in literature.

I feel I am free but I know I am not.

In each man I passed I discerned a cadaver, in each odor a rot, in each joy a last grimace.

know peace only when my ambitions sleep. Once they waken, anxiety repossesses me.

Since these retarded creatures, these haters, are becoming increasingly rare, and since Christianity finds no comfort for the loss of so lasting a popularity, it seeks on all sides an event likely to restore it to the foreground, to actuality.

No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.

Everywhere I stumbled against future victims of the noose, against their imminent shadows: other men's lives wore no mystery for The One who scrutinized them through my eyes.

So what! He exists. If he had given birth to books, if he had had the misfortune to 'realize' himself, we wouldn't have been talking about him the last hour.

one can merely disguise one's wounds

The Future awaits us in order to immolate us: the mind records nothing but the fracture of existence now, and the senses still vibrate only in the expectation of disaster…

Leaving to the Gentiles the ephemeral advantages of salvation, they opted for the lasting disadvantages of perdition.

My weakness for doomed dynasties, for decaying empires, for the Montezumas of forever, for those who believe in sings, for the lacerated and pursued, for the drunkards of the ineluctable, for the jeopardized, the devoured, for all who are waiting for their executioner...

Annas and Caiaphas embodied, to my eyes, good sense itself.

I knew nothingness by heart, and I accepted my knowledge.