Quotes from Emil M. Cioran

If I used to ask myself, over a coffin: "What good did it do the occupant to be born?," I now put the same question about anyone alive.

Le degré d'adversité dans lequel nous vivons peut être jugé selon le rôle que joue le soleil dans nos préoccupations, selon notre ingratitude. Car nous commençons à penser à partir du moment où nous ne montrons plus la moindre reconnaissance envers lui.

Existence = Torment. The equation seems obvious to me

In order to conquer panic or some tenacious anxiety, there is nothing like imagining your own burial.

One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.

The emphasis on birth is no more than the craving for the insoluble carried to the point of insanity.

Pope Innocent IX, who, having commissioned a painting in which he was shown on his deathbed, glanced at it each time he had to make some important decision.

We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth

The mob asks to be overwhelmed by invective, by threats and revelations, by shattering pronouncements: the mob loves a shouter.

What dates most is rebellion - that is, the most vital of our reactions.

Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us.

The things that we have expressed we believe a little less in. Why? Because they detach themselves from you. In that sense, really the fact of writing is a kind of profanation. Because the things in which you believe fully, from the moment you have said them, they mean less to you.

Overrun on every side, stoicism, faithful to its principles, had the elegance to die without a struggle.

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.

Having enemies is a heavy responsibility. My burden is sufficient, I no longer can carry that of others as well.

If a man loves nothing, he will be invulnerable" (Chuang Tse).

birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.

Recapitulate the history of ideas, acts, attitudes and you find that the future was always on the side of the rabble.

Man is not content to be man. But he doesn't know what to revert to, nor how to recover a state of which he has no clear memory. His nostalgia for it is the basis of his being, and it is by such nostalgia he communicates with all that remains of what is oldest in himself.

The flayed man as theoretician of detachment...The convulsionary as skeptic...

The apprenticeship to passivity—I know nothing more contrary to our habits.

If disgust for the world conferred sanctity of itself, I fail to see how I could avoid canonization.

Outside of the surrender of the incommunicable, the suspension amid our mute and unconsoled anxieties, life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.

We can endure any truth, however destructive