Quotes from Emil M. Cioran

What are the occupations of the sage? He resigns himself to seeing, to eating, etc…., he accepts in spite of himself this "wound with nine openings," which is what the Bhagavad-Gita calls the body.?Wisdom? To undergo with dignity the humiliation inflicted upon us by our holes.

Quando elevar a voz, seja em nome do céu, da cidade ou de outros pretextos, afaste-se dele: sátiro de nossa solidão, não perdoa que vivamos aquém de suas verdades e de seus arrebatamentos; quer fazer-nos compartilhar de sua histeria, de seu bem, impô-la a nós e desfigurar-nos.

True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.

Poate c? toÈ›i românii nu suntem decât niÈ™te copii b?trâni. S? ne fi n?scut din oboseala romanilor È™i lacrimile dacilor?

The mind that puts everything in question reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?

A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth, where our mania for salvation makes life unbreathable... Everyone trying to remedy everyone's life. Society- an inferno of saviors!

The first thinker was, without a doubt, the first man obsessed by why. An unaccustomed mania, not at all contagious: rare indeed are those who suffer from it, who are a prey to questioning, and who can accept no given because they were born in consternation.

And if Indifference fills him to overflowing, if he makes it into a reality as vast as the universe itself, it is because Indifference is the practical equivalent of doubt, and in his eyes does doubt not have the prestige of the Unconditioned?

For the victim of anxiety, there is no difference between success and fiasco. His reaction to the one is the same as to the other: both trouble him equally.

It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.

Existence = Torment. The equation seems obvious to me, but not to one of my friends. How to convince him? I cannot lend him my sensations; yet only they would have the power to persuade him, to give him that additional dose of ill-being he has so insistently asked for all this time.

And this nothing, this everything, cannot give life a meaning, but it nonetheless makes life persevere in what it is: a state of non-suicide.

Deep in his heart, man aspires to rejoin the condition he had before consciousness. History is merely the detour he takes to get there.

You with your veins full of night — you have no more place among men than an epitaph in the middle of a circus.

The not at all negligible advantage of having greatly hated men is that one comes to endure them by the exhaustion of this very hatred.

X maintains we are at the end of a "cosmic cycle" and that soon everything will fall apart. And he does not doubt this for one moment. At the same time, he is the father of a--numerous--family. With certitudes like his, what aberration has deluded him into bringing into a doomed world one child after the next? If we foresee the End, if we are sure it will be coming soon, if we even anticipate it, better to do so alone. One does not procreate on Patmos.

The white race increasingly deserves the name given by the American Indians: palefaces.

Old age is the most unexpected thing of all that happens to man," - notes Trotsky a few years before his end. If, as a young man, he had had the exact, visceral intuition of this truth, what a miserable revolutionary he would have made!

History is irony on the move.

In order not to have to resolve them, I have turned all my practical difficulties into theoretical ones. Faced with the Insoluble, I breathe at last. . . .

To that friend who tells me he is bored because he cannot work, I answer that boredom is a higher state, and that we debase it by relating it to the notion of work.

When someone complains that his life has come to nothing, we need merely remind him that life itself is in an analogous situation, if not worse.

The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.

The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.