Emil M. Cioran: Trending quotes

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

“Self-knowledge — the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?”

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

“When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.”

“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.”

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

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.”

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

“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.”