Emil Cioran Quotes

One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.

Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself.

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

I seem to myself, among civilised men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.

The skeptic is the least mysterious man in the world, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world.

I used to ask myself, over a coffin: “What good did it do the occupant to be born?,” I now put the same question about anyone alive.

If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.

Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.

How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history — greater than the fall of empires — I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know where that elsewhere is.

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

However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; — unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them. The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.

A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints.

We suffer: the external world begins to exist . . . ; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality.