Emil Cioran Quotes

How I wish I didn't know anything about myself and this world!

Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.

"You really should come to the house — one of these days we might die without having seen each other again." — "Since we have to die in any case, what's the use of seeing each other again?"

"Where do you get those superior airs of yours?" "I've managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?"

I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.

I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away.

The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?

Glory — once achieved, what is it worth?

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.

Hope is the normal form of delirium.

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.

We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.