Emil M. Cioran: Quotes about the world

“How can you know if you are in the truth? The criterion is simple enough: if others make a vacuum around you, there is not a doubt in the world that you are closer to the essential than they are.”

“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.”

“True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.”

“In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.”

“I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.”

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

“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.”

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

“For a long while I have lived with the notion that I was the most normal being that ever existed. This notion gave me the taste, even the passion for being unproductive: what was the use of being prized in a world inhabited by madmen, a world mired in mania and stupidity? For whom was one to bother, and to what end? It remains to be seen if I have quite freed myself from this certitude, salvation in the absolute, ruin in the immediate.”

“Vague a l'ame — melancholy yearning for the end of the world.”

“To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.”

“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?”

“Facing a landscape annihilated by the light, to remain serene supposes a temper I do not have. The sun is my purveyor of black thoughts; and summer the season when I have always reconsidered my relations with this world and with myself, to the greatest prejudice of both.”

“The skeptic is the least mysterious man in the world, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world.”

“To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously.”

“To tell the truth, I couldn't care less about the relativity of knowledge, simply because the world does not deserve to be known.”

“You have dreamed of setting the world ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light up a single one!”

“To detach yourself elegantly from the world; to give contour and grace to sadness; a solitude in style; a walk that gives cadence to memories; stepping towards the intangible; with the breath in the trembling margins of things; the past reborn in the overflow of fragrances; the smell, through which we conquer time; the contour of the invisible things; the forms of the immaterial; to deepen yourself in the intangible; to touch the world airborne by smell; aerial dialogue and gliding dissolution; to bathe in your own reflecting fragmentation…”