Emil Cioran Quotes

All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

I think of so many people who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death.

Nothing surpasses the pleasures of idleness: even if the end of the world were to come, I would not leave my bed at an ungodly hour.

I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the Gods have been against me.

What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.

Read day and night, devour books — these sleeping pills — not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.

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

We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.

Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying? — that void is consciousness itself.

Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.

This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique — and insignificant.

Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.

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