Emil Cioran Quotes

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.

Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?

We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die. — Didn't you know that's how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?

Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.

I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide.

From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.

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.

Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.

He detested objective truths, the burden of argument, sustained reasoning. He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one. Others are a dialectician's invention.

Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

To make more plans than an explorer or a crook, yet to be infected at the will's very root.

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

Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it; hence the mind feels more comfortable in the society of a braggart than in that of a martyr; and nothing is more repugnant to it than the spectacle of dying for an idea.

Late at night. I feel like falling into a frenzy, doing some unprecedented thing to release myself, but I don't see against whom, against what...