Quotes from Emil M. Cioran

We should keep to a single language, and deepen our knowledge of it at every opportunity. For a writer, gossiping with a concierge in his own is much more profitable than arguing with a scholar in a foreign tongue.

The best of myself, that point of light which distances me from everything, I owe to my infrequent encounters with a few bitter fools, a few disconsolate bastards, who, victims of the rigor of their cynicism, could no longer attach themselves to any vice.

The moments follow each other; nothing lends them the illusion of a content or the appearance of a meaning; they pass; their course is not ours; we contemplate that passage, prisoners of a stupid perception. The heart's void confronting time's: two mirrors, reflecting each other's absence, one and the same image of nullity…

Though we ourselves have come too late, we shall be envied by our immediate successors, and still more by our remote descendants. In their eyes we shall have the look of privileged characters, and rightly so, for everyone wants to be as far as possible from the future.

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

Ferocity occurs in all conditions save in joy. Schadenfreude, malicious joy, is a misrepresentation. To do evil is a pleasure, not a joy. Joy, the one true victory over the world, is pure in its essence, hence irreducible to pleasure, which is always suspect, both in itself and in its manifestations.

De cierto tipo de vigilias se desprende el cuestionar el nacimiento.

This world can take everything from us, can forbid us everything, but no one has the power to keep us from wiping ourselves out.

There is something enveloping and voluptuous about the notion of fatality: it keeps you warm.

Do prawdziwego kontaktu mi?dzy osobami dochodzi jedynie poprzez niem? obecno??, pozorny brak komunikacji, na drodze tajemniczej, bezs?ownej wymiany podobnej do cichej modlitwy.

With all due respect to Tertullian, the soul is naturally pagan. Any god at all, when he answers to our immediate needs, represents for us an increase of vitality, a stimulus, which is not the case if he is imposed upon us or if he corresponds to no necessity. Paganism's mistake was to have accepted and accumulated too many of them: it died of generosity and excess of understanding—it died from a lack of instinct.

Gdziekolwiek si? rusz? - to samo odczucie nieprzynale?no?ci, bezu?ytecznej gry. Udaj? zainteresowanie czym?, co mnie zupe?nie nie obchodzi, kr?c? si? tu i tam, ale nigdy nie jestem "w ?rodku", w ?adnym okre?lonym miejscu. To, co mnie przyci?ga, znajduje si? gdzie? indziej, czym za? owo "gdzie indziej" jest - nie wiem.

Happy in love, Adam would have spared us History.

Man will not last. Ambushed by exhaustion, he will have to pay for his too-original career. For it would be inconceivable and contra naturam that he drag on much longer and come to a good end. This prospect is depressing, hence likely.

Noble gestures are always suspect. Each time, we regret having committed them. Something false about them, something theatrical, attitudinizing. It is true that we regret ignoble gestures almost as much.

We dismiss the skeptic, we speak of an "automatism of doubt," while we never say of a believer that he has fallen into an "automatism of faith." Yet faith is much more mechanical than doubt, which has the excuse of proceeding from surprise to surprise — inside perplexity, it is true.

What makes bad poets worse is that they read only poets (just as bad philosophers read only philosophers), whereas they would benefit much more from a book of botany or geology. We are enriched only by frequenting disciplines remote from our own. This is true, of course, only for realms where the ego is rampant, §

The future appeals to you? All yours! Myself I prefer to keep to the incredible present and the incredible past. I leave it to you to face the Incredible itself.

My greed for agonies has made me die so many times that it strikes me as indecent to keep on abusing a corpse from which I can get nothing more.

Not the fear of effort but the fear of success explains more than one failure.

What is the point of what we say? Is there any meaning to this series of propositions which constitutes our talk? And do these propositions, taken one by one, have any object? We can talk only if we set aside this question, or if we raise it as infrequently as possible.

What's wrong—what's the matter with you?" Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for. . . .

Death is not altogether useless: after all, it is because of death that we may be able to recuperate the prenatal space, our only space....

The more injured you are by time, the more you seek to escape it. To write a faultless page, or only a sentence, raises you above becoming and its corruptions. You transcend death by the pursuit of the indestructible in speech, in the very symbol of nullity.