Emil Cioran Quotes

Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion.

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

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

Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.

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.

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.

Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.

Thanks to depression — that alpinism of the indolent — we scale every summit and daydream over every precipice from our bed.

Life is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it.

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.

The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to form a reality to reality's detriment.

The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so...

We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

Only those moments count when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than to exchange a word with someone.

Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man.