Emil M. Cioran: Trending quotes (page 23)

“I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.”

“Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?”

“Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing — between two fictions.”

“Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.”

“Without its assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation?”

“The need to devour oneself absolves one of the need to believe.”

“Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.”

“Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.”

“We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.”

“The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.”

“Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious.”

“What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.”

“Try as I will, I don't see what might exist…”

“The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.”

“If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned — a saint or a corpse.”

“To try curing someone of a "vice," of what is the deepest thing he has, is to attack his very being, and this is indeed how he himself understands it, since he will never forgive you for wanting him to destroy himself in your way and not his.”

“In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future.”

“Saints live in flames; wise men, next to them.”

“If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.”