Quotes from Emil M. Cioran

Every season is an ordeal; nature changes and renews herself only in order to scourge us.

I am one of the billions dragging himself across the earth's surface. One, and no more.

We cannot elude existence by explanations, we can only endure it, love it or hate it, adore it or dread it, in that alternation of happiness and horror which expresses the very rhythm of being, its oscillations, its dissonances, its bright or bitter vehemences.

On devrait s'en tenir à un seul idiome, et en approfondir lamconnaissance à chaque occasion. Pour un écrivain, bavarder avec une concierge est bien plus profitable que s'entretenir avec un savant dans une langue étrangère.

Conquest and Inquisition—parallel phenomena, products of Spain's imposing vices.

A nation which no longer rapes is in its decadence; the number of rapes reveals its instincts, and its future. Find out in which war it has stopped practicing, on a large scale, this variety of crime: you will have found the first symbol of its decline; find out at what moment love has become for a nation a ceremonial, and the bed a condition of orgasm, and you will identify the beginning of its deficiencies and the end of its barbaric inheritance.

The pleasure of slandering yourself greatly exceeds that of being slandered.

For all its lucidity, this people readily sacrifices to illusion: it hopes, it always hopes too much

No need to elaborate works

Renunciation is the only kind of action that is not degrading.

The more closely we scrutinize our tomorrows, the closer we come to and the more we flee this people: all of us tremble at the obligation to resemble it some day . .

Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.

Someone we regard highly comes closer to us when he performs an action unworthy of him--thereby he releases us from the cavalry of veneration. And starting from that moment we feel a true attachment to him.

The great systems are actually no more than brilliant tautologies. What advantage is it to know that the nature of being consists in the 'will to live,' in 'idea,' or in the whim of God or of Chemistry? A mere proliferation of words, subtle displacements of meanings. What is loathes the verbal embrace, and our innermost experience reveals us nothing beyond the privileged and inexpressible moment. Moreover, Being itself is only a pretension of Nothingness.

Man interests me only since he has ceased to believe in himself. Wile he was in his ascending phase, he deserved no more than indifference. Now he provokes a new sentiment, a special sympathy: compassionate horror.

Strictly speaking, history does not repeat itself, but since the illusions man is capable of are limited in number, they always return in another disguise, thereby giving some ultradecrepit filth a look of novelty and a tragic glaze.

Philosophy is taught only in the agora, in a garden, or at home. The lecture chair is the grave of philosophy, the death of any living thought, the dais is the mind in mourning.

Since there can only be a limited number of ways to face the ultimate problems, the mind is limited in its expansion by that natural boundary which is the essential, by that impossibility of indefinitely multiplying the capital difficulties: history is solely concerned with changing the aspect of a sum of questions and solutions.

The philosophers' originality comes down to inverting terms. Since there are only three or four attitudes by which to confront the world – and about as many ways of dying – the nuances which multiply and diversify them derive from no more than the choice of words, bereft of any metaphysical range. We are engulfed in a pleonastic universe, in which the questions and answers amount to the same thing.

We pursue whatever we pursue out of torment — a need for torment. Our very quest for salvation is a torment, the subtlest, the best camoulaged of all.

To exempt themselves from action, oppressed peoples entrust themselves to "fate," a negative salvation as well as a means of interpreting events: a philosophy of history for daily use, a determinist vision on an effective basis, a metaphysic of circumstance . . .

If he changes his country, his drama merely begins again: exodus is his seat, his certainty, his chez soi.

Of all the bonds which link us to things, there is not one which fails to slacken and dissolve under the influence of suffering, which frees us from everything except the obsession of ourselves and the sensation of being irrevocably individual. Suffering is solitude hypostatized as essence.

When we have committed the folly of confiding a secret to someone, the only way of being sure he will keep it to himself is to kill him on the spot.