Quotes from Emil M. Cioran

As a general rule, men expect disappointment:

Where to go? Where to live? And what to seek in the uproar of a Babylonized planet?

Les douleurs sont incompatibles avec le soleil, qui les expose néanmoins à la lumière. Tout ce que nous avons caché dans nos nuits, nos possibilités de soupirs et nos soupirs effectifs, tout cela se répand dans son spectre, ses rayons se brisent, et il gît, aveuglé" par notre douleur, dans le tombeau de sa propre lumière.

I believe in the future of the terrible.

Nothing procures so many crowns for the monk as discouragement.

my nature forces me to drift, to remain forever in the equivocal

The people inside us bears the responsibility for our excesses, our extravagances: what is more plebeian than a sentiment?

My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding.

The clear-sighted person who understands himself, explains himself, justifies himself, and dominates his action will never make a memorable gesture. Psychology is the hero's grave.

our past so quickly stops being "ours" and turns into history, something which no longer concerns anyone.

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.

True contact between beings is established only by mute presence

At this precise moment, no reproach proceeding from men or gods can affect me: I have as good a conscience as if I had never existed.

at this hour of the morning, I needed no one.

We can act only against the truth. Man starts over again every day, in spite of everything he knows, against everything he knows.

To be objective is to treat others as you treat an object, a corpse - to behave with them like an undertaker.

I am far from trying to pervert your hopes: life will take care of that. Like everyone else, you will proceed from one forfeiture to the next.

Since it is words that bind us to things, we cannot detach ourselves from things unless we first break with words.

everything I think is only myself and the self's humiliations.

The mission of Everyman is to fulfill the lies he incarnates, to succeed in being no more than an exhaust illusion.

Parmenides. Nowhere do I perceive the Being he exalts, and fail to see myself in his sphere, which includes no fault, no place for me.

A master of every error, I could at last explore a world of appearances, of frivolous enigmas. Nothing more to pursue, except the pursuit of nothing.

I breathe in my fashion.

How right it was to begin the day, as men once did, with a prayer, a call for help! Ignorant of whom to address ourselves to, we will end by groveling before the first cracked god to come along.