Quotes from Emil M. Cioran

Incapable of getting up, nailed to my bed, I drift with the whims of my memory

So long as man is protected by madness, he functions and flourishes; but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.

We have always been dying, and yet death has lost none of its freshness, its originality. Herein lies the secret of secrets.

A man who loves his god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.

A man who sees too far, who is contemporary with the whole future, can no longer act or even move. . . .

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

It's all the way it's always been and probably always will be until there's nothing left any more.

I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living.

Whatever people try to do, they'll regret it sooner or later.

A civilization which began with the cathedrals has to end with the hermeticism of schizophrenia.

To shake people up, to wake them from their sleep, while knowing you are committing a crime and that it would be a thousand times better to leave them alone, since when they wake, too, you have nothing to offer them. . . .

I repudiate those who exhibit their so-called "salvation" and prop it with a doctrine which does not emanate from themselves. To unmask them, to knock them off the pedestal they have hoisted themselves on, to hold them up to scorn is a campaign no one should remain indifferent to. For at any price we must keep those who have too clear a conscience from living and dying in peace.

God is the conditioned creature par excellence, the slave of slaves, prisoner of His attributes, of what He is. Man, on the contrary, has a certain leeway insofar as he is not - insofar as, possessing only a borrowed existence, he struggles in pseudoreality.

There is life only in the inattention to life.

The only part of the planet where existence seemed to have some justification is tainted with gangrene.

A poor wretch who feels time, who is its victim, its martyr, who experiences nothing else, who is time at each moment, knows what a metaphysician or a poet divines only by grace of a collapse or a miracle.

It's already in the past," he says about all he achieves, even as he achieves it, thereby forever destitute of the present.

We last only as long as our fictions.

reality" falls within the province of lunacy.

How difficult it is to dissolve oneself in Being!

The solutions offered by our ancestral cowardice are the worst desertions of our duty to intellectual decency. To be fooled, to live and die duped, is certainly what men do. But there exists a dignity which keeps us from disappearing into God and which transforms all our moments into prayers we shall never offer.

A foretold misfortune, when at last it occurs, is ten, is a hundred times harder to endure than one we did not expect.

Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.

what luck, what a windfall! I am still alive, I am still one of those flesh-and-blood ghosts. . . .