Emil M. Cioran Quotes

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“It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: in truth, it is itself the quintessence of injustice.”

“The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know where that elsewhere is.”

“If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.”

“What is marvelous is that each day brings us a new reason to disappear.”

“There are no arguments. Can anyone who has reached the limit bother with arguments, causes, effects, moral considerations, and so forth? Of course not. For such a person there are only unmotivated motives for living. On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos. When all the current reasons — moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on — no longer guide one's life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.”

“Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.”

“We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.”

“The terrifying experience and obsession of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of yourself. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness.”

“Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.”

“One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.”

“No one has the audacity to exclaim: “I don’t want to do anything!” —we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions.”

“Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.”

“Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.”

“The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue.”

“If someone incessantly drops the word "life," you know he's a sick man.”

“Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.”

“Two enemies — the same man divided.”

“What anxiety when one is not sure of one's doubts or wonders: are these actually doubts?”

“An anxious man constructs his terrors, then installs himself within them: a stay-at-home in a yawning chasm.”

“I am for the most part so convinced that everything is lacking in basis, consequence, justification, that if someone dared to contradict me, even the man I most admire, he would seem to me a charlatan or a fool.”

“Hope is the normal form of delirium.”

“Thanks to depression — that alpinism of the indolent — we scale every summit and daydream over every precipice from our bed.”

“Only thoughts that are randomly born die. The other thoughts we carry with us without knowing them. They have abandoned themselves to forgetfulness so that they can be with us all the time.”

“Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.”

“I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the Gods have been against me.”

“In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.”

“"Where do you get those superior airs of yours?" "I've managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?"”

“Where are my sensations? They have melted into… me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?”

“The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?”

“My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.”

“Life is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it.”

“Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.”

“The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it.”

“Nothing is indefensible — from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime.”

“Consciousness is nature's nightmare.”

“A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.”

“What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?”

“Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.”

“When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.”

“I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.”

“We always love... despite; and that "despite" covers an infinity.”

“What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!”

“To be is to be cornered.”

“To withstand any truth…”

“Eternity is absence.”

“You really should come to the house — one of these days we might die without having seen each other again.”

“Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that we alone pursue the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear.”

“Love of the absolute engenders a predilection for self-destruction. Hence the passion for monasteries and brothels. Cells and women, in both cases. Weariness with life fares well in the shadow of whores and saintly women.”

“The first thinker was, without a doubt, the first man obsessed by why. An unaccustomed mania, not at all contagious: rare indeed are those who suffer from it, who are a prey to questioning, and who can accept no given because they were born in consternation.”