Quotes from Emil M. Cioran

Voltaire was the first literary man to erect his incompetence into a procedure, a method.

To deliver blows none of which land, to attack everyone without anyone's noticing, to shoot arrows whose poison you alone receive!

To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall? To publish one's taints in order to amuse or exasperate!

Of all those who suffered a long period of slavery, they alone have succeeded in resisting the charms of abulia.

How I'd like to be a plant, even If I had to keep vigil over a piece of shit

Tot ceea ce iese din cadrele acceptate ale vie?ii de fiecare zi se ipostaziaz?, deoarece umanul are grani?e care exclud neobi?nuitul.

Poem, novel, essay, play—everything seems too long. The writer—it is his function—always says more than he has to say: he swells his thought and swathes it with words.

There is no limit-disappointment.

Boredom has made me into a speechifier ashamed of raising his voice, a theoretician for the senile and the adolescent, for metaphysical menopauses, a vestige of a creature, a hallucinated clown.

Paradox is not suited to burials, nor to weddings or births, in fact. Sinister — or grotesque — events require commonplaces; the terrible, like the painful, accommodates only the cliché.

During the long nights in the caves, how many Hamlets must have murmured their endless monologues

The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know where that elsewhere is.

I find it hard to understand your ambition to make a name for yourself in an age when the epigone is de rigueur.

We forgive only madmen and children for being frank with us: others, if they have the audacity to imitate them, will regret it sooner or later.

What shall we tell the blind woman in Rilke's poem who lamented that 'I can no longer live with the sky upon me'? Would it comfort her if we told her we can no longer live with the earth underneath our feet?

I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.