Emil M. Cioran: Trending quotes (page 7)

“Revenge is not always sweet: once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.”

“Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.”

“By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.”

“Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.”

“Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.”

“The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.”

“Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection.”

“There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.”

“I long to be free — desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.”

“Between the demand to be clear, and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect.”

“We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.”

“We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.”

“Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.”

“Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.”

“This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique — and insignificant.”

“We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job…”

“The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion, when the intuition of disaster is so painful that it almost provokes a greater madness […] One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.”

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

“No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.”