Emil Cioran Quotes

Only the idiot is equipped to breathe.

If someone incessantly drops the word "life," you know he's a sick man.

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

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Impossible to accede to truth by opinions, for each opinion is only a mad perspective of reality.

I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.

"I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside." This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works on introspection.

I have a weakness for cemeteries, though they aren't so beautiful anymore, because they are simply overpopulated! When I meet friends or people I know who are going through a difficult period, I usually have this advice for them: "Go for twenty minutes in acemetery and you'll see that, though your worry won't disappear, you'll almost forget about it and you'll feel better." Just a few days ago I told a young woman who was suffering fearfully from an unhappy love, "Since you don't live far from Montparnasse, take a walk through the cemetery, just half an hour, and you will see that your misery will appear bearable." In such a situation, it is much better to do that than to go to a doctor; there is no medicine that can help. To visit a cemetery in such a situation is a lesson, a lesson in wisdom! I have always practiced such methods, or recommended them, although it may not seem altogether serious, but it has been effective in every case. What can one say that is meaningful to someone in despair? Absolutely nothing, or almost nothing. My advice shows immediate results.

Tears do not burn except in solitude.

The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue.

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.

If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.

To be is to be cornered.

I am displeased with everything. If they made me God, I would immediately resign.

If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.