Emil Cioran Quotes

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

Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.

We replace God as best we can; for every god is good, provided he perpetuates in eternity our desire for a crucial solitude. . . .

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.

The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.

maybe suffering has no more justification than life.

To hope is to contradict the future.

Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.

For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

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

Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.

On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I."

"The most interesting aspect of suffering is the sufferer's belief in its absoluteness. He believes he has a monopoly on suffering. I think that I alone suffer, that I alone have the right to suffer, although I also realize that there are modalities of suffering more terrible than mine, pieces of flesh falling from the bones, the body crumbling under one's very eyes, monstrous, criminal , shameful sufferings. One asks oneself, How can this be, and if it be, how can one still speak of finality and other such old wives' tales? Suffering moves me so much that I lose all my courage. I lose heart because I do not understand why there is suffering in the world.", in essay: the monopoly of suffering

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

In order to conceive, and to steep ourselves in, unreality, we must have it constantly present to our minds. The day we feel it, see it, everything becomes unreal, except that unreality which alone makes existence tolerable.