Emil M. Cioran Quotes

“We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die. - Didn't you know that's how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?”

“The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness.”

“Philosophy offers an antidote to melancholy. And many still believe in the depth of philosophy!”

“Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man.”

“What are you waiting for in order to give up?”

“Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.”

“In theory, it matters little to me whether I live as whether I die; in practice, I am lacerated by every anxiety which opens an abyss between life and death.”

“Only those are happy who never think or, rather, who only think about life's bare necessities, and to think about such things means not to think at all. True thinking resembles a demon who muddies the spring of life or a sickness which corrupts its roots. To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life, to leave behind you, as symbols of your life's drama, a trail of smoke and blood — all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you.”

“A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.”

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

“How can you know if you are in the truth? The criterion is simple enough: if others make a vacuum around you, there is not a doubt in the world that you are closer to the essential than they are.”

“The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it. Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?”

“How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history — greater than the fall of empires — I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.”

“I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.”

“How I wish I didn't know anything about myself and this world!”

“Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.”

“A man does not kill himself, as is commonly supposed, in a fit of madness but rather in a fit of unendurable lucidity, in a paroxysm which may, if so desired, be identified with madness; for an excessive perspicacity, carried to the limit and of which one longs to be rid at all costs, exceeds the context of reason.”

“It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”

“I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away.”

“Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?”

“The farther men get from God, the farther they advance into the knowledge of religions.”

“A book is a suicide postponed.”

“There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another.”

“"What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself."”

“To have committed every crime but that of being a father.”

“Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.”

“The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.”

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

“Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence.”

“Only optimists commit suicide, the optimists who can no longer be... optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?”

“Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”

“We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.”

“What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.”

“Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.”

“There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.”

“Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!”

“Society: an inferno of saviors!”

“When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.”

“One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.”

“In order to conceive, and to steep ourselves in, unreality, we must have it constantly present to our minds. The day we feel it, see it, everything becomes unreal, except that unreality which alone makes existence tolerable.”

“After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?”

“But, braggart demons, we postpone our end: how could we renounce the display of our freedom, the show of our pride?”

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

“By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?”

“Doutbless, revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim, or else we are tangled in the subtleties of remorse; so vengeance too has its venom, though it comes closer to what we are, to what we feel, to the very law of the self; it is also healthier than magnanimity. The Furies were held to antedate the gods, Zeus included. Vengeance before Divinity! This is the Major intuition of ancient mythology.”

“Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.”

“Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.”

“Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.”

“Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.”

“Only those moments count when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than to exchange a word with someone.”

“Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.”

“Tears do not burn except in solitude.”

“If we could truly see ourselves the way others see us we'd disappear on the spot.”

“If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.”

“We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.”

“True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.”

“To live entirely without a goal! I have glimpsed this state, and have often attained it, without managing to remain there: I am too weak for such happiness.”

“No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.”

“The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.”

“Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.”

“"Do I look like someone who has something to do here on Earth?" - That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.”

“I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?”

“In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.”

“When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What's your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act."”

“Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are.”

“Read day and night, devour books — these sleeping pills — not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.”