Emil Cioran Quotes

To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion.

Nothing deserves to be undone, doubtless because nothing deserved to be done.

In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left...with a foolish grin.

Try as I will, I don't see what might exist...

What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.

There exists, I grant you, a clinical depression, upon which certain remedies occasionally have effect; but there exists another kind, a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself.

I have no ideas, only obsessions. Anybody can have ideas. Ideas have never caused anybody’s downfall.

Tears do not burn except in solitude.

Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle...

The farther men get from God, the farther they advance into the knowledge of religions.

I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.

Can it really be that for us existence means exile, and nothingness, home?

But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle. . .

I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.

To have grazed every form of failure, including success.