Quotes from E. M. Cioran

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.

No one can keep his griefs in their prime; they use themselves up.

Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death!

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

A book is a postponed suicide.

A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves.

God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.

How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.

All our thoughts are a function of our ailments. If we understand certain things, the credit for it goes to the gaps in our health—and to them alone.

Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.

It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say "we" with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke "others" and regard himself as their interpreter - for me to consider him my enemy.

In a world without melancholy, nightingales would start burping

I may change my opinion on the same subject, the same event, ten, twenty, thirty times in the course of a single day. And to think that each time, like the worst impostor, I dare utter word "truth"!

It is my prejudice against everything that turns out well that has given me a taste for reading history.

By sanctifying History in order to discredit God, Marxism has merely rendered Him more peculiar and more haunting. You can stifle every impulse in humanity except the need for an Absolute, which will survive the destruction of temples and even the disappearance of religion on earth. The core of the Russian people being religious, they will inevitably gain the upper hand...

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

O não-saber é o fundamento de tudo, ele cria o todo através de um acto que repete a cada instante, produz este mundo e qualquer outro, uma vez que está sempre a tomar como real aquilo que o não é. O não-saber é o gigantesco equívoco que serve de base a todas as nossas verdades, o não-saber é mais antigo e mais poderoso do que todos os deuses juntos.

Ne pas naître est sans contredit la meilleur formule qui soit. Elle n'est malheureusement à la portée de personne

Wisdom disguises our wounds: it teaches us how to bleed in secret.

Magari potessi innalzarmi al livello di colui che avrei voluto essere! Ma non so quale forza, che si accresce con gli anni, mi tira verso il basso. Perfino per risalire alla mia superficie devo impiegare stratagemmi ai quali non posso pensare senza arrossire

Le réel me donne de l'asthme.

Democracy is a festival of mediocrity.