Emil M. Cioran: Quotes about life

“I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide.”

“In theory, it matters little to me whether I live as whether I die; in practice, I am lacerated by every anxiety which opens an abyss between life and death.”

“Only those are happy who never think or, rather, who only think about life's bare necessities, and to think about such things means not to think at all. True thinking resembles a demon who muddies the spring of life or a sickness which corrupts its roots. To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life, to leave behind you, as symbols of your life's drama, a trail of smoke and blood — all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you.”

“The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live — moreover, the only one.”

“If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.”

“We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.”

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

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

“Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.”

“The reaction against your own thought in itself lends life to thought. How this reaction is born is hard to describe, because it identifies with the very rare intellectual tragedies. ––The tension, the degree and level of intensity of a thought proceeds from its internal antinomies, which in turn are derived from the unsolvable contradictions of a soul. Thought cannot solve the contradictions of the soul. As far as linear thinking is concerned, thoughts mirror themselves in other thoughts, instead of mirroring a destiny.”

“Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.”

“Great joys, why do they bring us sadness? Because there remains from these excesses only a feeling of irrevocable loss and desertion which reaches a high degree of negative intensity. At such moments, instead of a gain, one keenly feels loss. sadness accompanies all those events in which life expends itself. its intensity is equal to its loss. Thus death causes the greatest sadness.”

“One disgust, then another — to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind…The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive.”

“The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.”

“Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.”

“Everyone must destroy their life. According to the way they do it, they're either triumphants or failures.”

“We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good — have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us. What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: "If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world. …" And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.”

“If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.”

“The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life.”