Quotes from Emil M. Cioran

This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return.

Only God has the privilege of abandoning us. Men can only drop us.

Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?" —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

So long as I give myself up to physical exercise, manual labor, I am happy, fulfilled; once I stop, I am seized by dizziness, and I can think of nothing but giving up for good.

Over the gate of our cemeteries should be written: "Nothing Is Tragic. Everything Is Unreal.

At grips, however, with the quasi-totality of humanity, they know that antisemitism does not represent a phenomenon of one period or another, but a constant, and that yesterday's exterminators used the same terms as Tacitus . . .

Forced to face their depths and fearing them, the Jews try to bypass, to elude them by clinging to the trifles of conversation: they talk, they talk . .

Panic in the face of anything—of presence, of the void, of anything. Original panic.

What an idea, to want to be loved! They impose it upon themselves without success. After so many fruitless attempts, would they not be better off yielding to the obvious, admitting at last the substantiation of their disappointments?

For it ends only to be replaced by fear

We never follow the consistent rationalist for long; once we pluck out his mystery and know where he is headed, we abandon him to his system

If with each word we win a victory over nothingness, it is only the better to endure its reign. We die in proportion to the words which we fling around us . . . Those who speak have no secrets. And we all speak. We betray ourselves, we exhibit our heart; executioner of the unspeakable, each of us labors to destroy all the mysteries, beginning with our own.

Ne se suicident que les optimistes qui ne peuvent plus l'être. Les autres, n'ayant aucune raison de vivre, pourquoi en auraient-ils de mourir ?

He who chooses time is engulfed by it and buries his genius therein.

There are a thousand perceptions of Nothing, and only one word to translate them: the indigence of language renders the universe intelligible . . .

Whatever they do and wherever they go, their mission is to keep watch; this is the command of their immemorial status as aliens. A solution to their fate does not exist.

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

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

This situation will last until the end of time. And it is to this situation that they owe the mishap of not perishing . . .

Even more than Socrates, it is Epicurus who nudged Philosophy toward Therapeutics.

History: a context in which the capital letters decompose, and with them, the men who imagine and cherish them.

For every discomfort is only an abortive metaphysical experience.

Estar en el tiempo, con menos provecho que Dios antes de la creación —imaginar y alcanzar el límite absoluto de la inutilidad.

The confessional? a rape of conscience perpetrated in the name of heaven. And that other rape, psychological analysis