Emil Cioran Quotes

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.

There is only this swarm of dying creatures stricken with longevity, all the more hateful in that they are so good at organizing their agony.

I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.

I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end.

Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

Why don't I commit suicide? Because I am as sick of death as I am of life.

By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world.

We are all secularised anarchists today.

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

With success and a literary career one becomes an unquestioning part of the mechanism, whereas the only truly important years are those in which one is unknown.

A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It's not easy to be on the wrong foot with life

To try curing someone of a "vice," of what is the deepest thing he has, is to attack his very being, and this is indeed how he himself understands it, since he will never forgive you for wanting him to destroy himself in your way and not his.

Death poses a problem which replaces all the others. What is deadly to philosophy, to the naive belief in the hierarchy of perplexities.

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.