Emil Cioran Quotes

I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.

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.

If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned — a saint or a corpse.

One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.

Pursued by our origins...we all are.

Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing — between two fictions.

As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.

Compared to the refined culture of sclerotic forms and frames, which mask everything, the lyrical mode is utterly barbarian in its expression. Its value resides precisely in its savage quality: it is only blood, sincerity, and fire.

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

If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.

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?

Life inspires more dread than death — it is life which is the great unknown.

Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.

Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.