Emil Cioran Quotes

I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.

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.

When we know what words are worth, the amazing thing is that we try to say anything at all, and that we manage to do so. This requires, it is true, a supernatural nerve.

Creation is in fact a fault, man's famous sin thereby appearing as a minor version of a much graver one. What are we guilty of, except of having followed, more or less slavishly, the Creator's example? Easy to recognize in ourselves the fatality which was His: not for nothing have we issued from the hands of a wicked and woebegone god, a god accursed.

The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character — precisely that and nothing more.

In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

There is no false sensation.

The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.

I dream of wanting — and all I want seems to me worthless.

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.

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

Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?

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.

So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.