Emil M. Cioran: Nothing

“We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.”

“There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.”

“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.”

“The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it. Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?”

“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.”

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

“To accomplish nothing and die of the strain”

“Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes — desertion after desertion.”

“A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse.”

“We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.”

“I don't understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn't it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?”

“All morning, I did nothing but repeat: "Man is an abyss, man is an abyss." - I could not, alas, find anything better.”

“Of all that makes us suffer, nothing — so much as disappointment — gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.”

“The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character - precisely that and nothing more.”

“Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?”

“Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.”

“Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.”

“Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.”

“I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.”