Emile m. cioran quotes

I am the beast with a contorted grin, contracting down to illusion and dilating toward infinity, both growing and dying, delightfully suspended between hope for nothing and despair of everything, brought up among perfumes and poisons, consumed with love and hatred, killed by lights and shadows. My symbol is death of light and the flame of death. Sparks die in me only to be reborn as thunder and lightning. Darkness itself glows in me.

If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.

I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?

My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

To accomplish nothing and die of the strain

Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.

Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.

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.

What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself.

Existing is plagiarism.

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.

No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.

A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.

By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?

After having struggled madly to solve all problems, after having suffered on the heights of despair, in the supreme hour of revelation, you will find that the only answer, the only reality, is silence.

Once you see that everything is unreal, you can't see why you should bother to prove it.

Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?

Between the demand to be clear,and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect.

Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.

Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.

The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are.

Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone.

There was a time when time did not yet exist.

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?

What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?

If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: "I want to be praised."

A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.

I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.

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

We inhabit a language rather than a country.

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false

I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.

Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret.

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?

As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.

Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death!

How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.

Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.

If a man has not, by the time he is thirty, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism—I don't know whether he is to be admired or scorned, regarded as a saint or a corpse.

The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.

The universal view melts things into a blur.

Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.

Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with our kind: the more we practice it, the more we become like everyone else: it is in the performance of a reputedly bestial function that we prove our status as citizens: nothing is more public than the sexual act.

Everything is pathology, except for indifference.

Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart's drama and the negative meaning of history.

It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.

Consider love: is there a nobler outpouring, a rapture less suspect? Its shudders rival music, compete with the tears of solitude and of ecstasy: sublime...but a sublimity inseperable from the urinary tract: transports bordering upon excretion, a heaven of the glands, sudden sancitity of the orifices. It takes no more than a moment of attention for this intoxication, shaken, to cast you back into the ordures of physiology or a moment of fatigue to recognize that so much ardor produces only a variety of mucous.

What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?

A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society

I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.

How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.

This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique - and insignificant.

However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?

I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?

If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame.

The Art of Love: knowing how to combine the temperament of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone.

We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.

I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside.

When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.

It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say “we" with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke "others" and regard himself as their interpreter - for me to consider him my enemy.

True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.

Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.

Man is a robot with defects.

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.

The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.

He who hates himself is not humble.

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

Society: an inferno of saviors!

What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.

A book is a suicide postponed.

I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.

Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself - there is no wish I make more often.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.

Consciousness is nature's nightmare.

I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person

Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.

To hope is to contradict the future.

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

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

The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable.

To act is to anchor in the imminent future.

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.

We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.

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.

We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

Try to be free: you will die of hunger.

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?

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.

Transmitting one's flaws [through procreation] to someone else is a crime. I could never consent to give life to someone who would inherent my ailments.

Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.

Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.

The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. Why call him a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot.

What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.

A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.

If you're unlucky enough not to have alcoholic parents, it takes you a whole lifetime of intoxication to overcome the dead weight of their virtues.

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?

Nothing sweeter than to drag oneself along behind events; and nothing more reasonable. But without a strong dose of madness, no initiative, no enterprise, no gesture. Reason: the rust of our vitality. It is the madman in us who forces us to adventure; once he abandons us, we are lost; everything depends on him, even our vegetative life; it is he who invites us, who obliges us to breathe, and it is also he who forces our blood to venture through our veins. Once he withdraws, we are alone indeed! We cannot be normal and alive at the same time.

Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.