Emil Cioran Quotes

When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment.

When you love someone, you hope — the more closely to be attached — that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.

The only subversive mind is the one that questions the obligation to exist; all the others, the anarchist at the top of the list, compromise with the established order.

It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should avoid simulacra and even "realities"; you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a "solitary elephant.

To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement.

By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?

Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

Doutbless, revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim, or else we are tangled in the subtleties of remorse; so vengeance too has its venom, though it comes closer to what we are, to what we feel, to the very law of the self; it is also healthier than magnanimity. The Furies were held to antedate the gods, Zeus included. Vengeance before Divinity! This is the Major intuition of ancient mythology.

Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.

The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness.

Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?

There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

Awareness of time: assault on time . . .