Emil Cioran Quotes

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.

This world was created from God's fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator. Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we live dramas for the boredom of a spectator, whose claps have never reached the ears of a mortal.

There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.

Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life.

I long to be free — desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.

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

The universal view melts things into a blur.

Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream.

Buddhism calls anger "corruption of the mind," Manicheism "root of the tree of death." I know this, but what good does it do me to know?

It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

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

A person who wakes up after a night of unbroken sleep has the illusion of beginning something new. When one instead remains awake the whole night long, nothing new begins.

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

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

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