Emil M. Cioran: Trending quotes (page 2)

“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?”

“I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide.”

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

“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?”

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

“The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.”

“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.”

“Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.”

“A book is a suicide postponed.”

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

“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.”

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

“One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.”

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

“Society: an inferno of saviors!”

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

“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.”

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

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