Quotes from Emil M. Cioran

To exist is a state as little conceivable as its contrary. No, still more inconceivable.

The leftist's despair is to battle in the name of principles that forbid him cynicism.

To have opinions is inevitable, is natural; to have convictions is less so. Each time I meet someone who has convictions, I wonder what intellectual vice, what flaw has caused him to acquire such a thing. However legitimate this question, my habit of raising it spoils the pleasure of conversation for me, gives me a bad conscience, makes me hateful in my own eyes.

In vain the West seeks a form of final agony worthy of its past.

ask those I love to be kind enough to grow old.

She meant absolutely nothing to me. Realizing, suddenly, after so many years, that whatever happens i shall never see her again, I nearly collapsed. We understand what death is only by suddenly remembering the face of someone who has been a matter of indifference to us.

A passion for music is in itself an avowal. We know more about a stranger who yields himself up to it than about someone who is deaf to music and whom we see every day.

A serious, honest mind understands—and can understand—nothing of history. History in return is marvelously suited to delight an erudite cynic.

However disabused one may be, it is impossible to live without any hope at all. We always keep one, unwittingly, and this unconscious hope makes up for all the explicit others we have rejected, exhausted.

Only a monster can allow himself the luxury of seeing things as they are.

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.

By a certain age, we should change names and hide out somewhere, lost to the world, in no danger of seeing friends or enemies again, leading the peaceful life of an overworked malefactor.

It is of no importance to know who I am since some day I shall no longer be"—that is what each of us should answer those who bother about our identity and desire at any price to coop us up in a category or a definition.

As serfs, these people built cathedrals; emancipated, they build only horrors.

Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be. — Emil Cioran, The Book of Delusions (? Humanitas, January 1, 1991) Originally publishedJanuary 1, 1936

I abuse the word God; I use it often, too often. I employ it each time I touch an extremity and need a word to designate what comes after. I prefer God to the Inconceivable.

In order to conquer panic or some tenacious anxiety, there is nothing like imagining your own burial. An effective method, readily available to all. In order not to have to resort to it too often in the course of a day, best to experience its benefit straight off, when you get up. Or else use it only at exceptional moments, like Pope Innocent IX, who, having commissioned a painting in which he was shown on his deathbed, glanced at it each time he had to make some important decision.

When modes of expression are worn out, art tends toward non-sense, toward a private and incomprehensible universe. An intelligible shudder, whether in painting, in music, or in poetry, strikes us, and rightly, as vulgar or out-of-date. The public will soon disappear; art will follow shortly. A civilization which began with the cathedrals has to end with the hermeticism of schizophrenia.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing; but instead of nonchalantly promenading our corruption, we exude our sweat and grow winded upon the fetid air. All History is in a state of petrification; its odours shift toward the future: we rush toward it, if only for the fever inherent in any decomposition.

He who is inclined to lust is merciful and tender-hearted; those who are inclined to purity are not so' (Saint John Climacus). It took a saint, neither more nor less, to denounce so distinctly and so vigorously not the lies but the very essence of Christian morality, and indeed of all morality.

There is no negator who is not famished for some catastrophic yes .

The appetite for torment is for some what the lure of gain is for others.

The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us to be posted in the schools.

In Europe, happiness stops at Vienna. Beyond, misery upon misery, since the beginning.