Emil M. Cioran: Trending quotes

“I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.”

Source: Tears and Saints (1937)

“We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born

“To accomplish nothing and die of the strain”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)
Variant: To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.

“I have always struggled, with the sole intention of ceasing to struggle. Result: zero.”

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!”

Source: Drawn and Quartered

“A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born

“As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.”

“the deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born

“How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.”

Source: On the Heights of Despair

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

Source: On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.”

“We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.”

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.”

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“He detested objective truths, the burden of argument, sustained reasoning. He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one. Others are a dialectician's invention.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“I dream of wanting — and all I want seems to me worthless.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.”

A Short History of Decay (1949)