Emil Cioran Quotes

Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.

When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What's your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act." And they do calm down.

One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.

A minimum of unconsciousness is necessary if one wants to stay inside history. To act is one thing; to know one is acting is another. When lucidity invests the action, insinuates itself into it, action is undone, and with it, prejudice, whose function consists, precisely, in subordinating, in enslaving consciousness to action. The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depths. No man concerned with his equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.

Hope is the normal form of delirium.

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.

This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.

Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes — desertion after desertion.

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.

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.

I admire only two types of people: the potentially mad and the potential suicide.

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