Emil Cioran Quotes

We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.

Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth . . .

The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools.

Philosophy offers an antidote to melancholy. And many still believe in the depth of philosophy!

I don't understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.

What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!

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.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live — moreover, the only one.

To fear is to die every minute.

Read day and night, devour books — these sleeping pills — not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.

To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze.

The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity... Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does this whispering voice say? Everything in us that is not human anymore.

Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

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