Quotes by Emil M. Cioran

“Il ne fait aucun doute pour moi que la sagesse est le but principal de la vie et c'est pourquoi je reviens toujours aux stociens. Ils ont atteint la sagesse, on ne peut donc plus les appeler des ph...”

“What are the occupations of the sage? He resigns himself to seeing, to eating, etc., he accepts in spite of himself this wound with nine openings, which is what the Bhagavad-Gita calls the body.Wis...”

“We breathe too fast to be able to grasp things in themselves or to expose their fragility. Our panting postulates and distorts them, creates and disfigures them, and binds us to them. I bestir myse...”

“A book is a suicide postponed.”

“It is no sign of benediction to have been obsessed with the lives of saints, for it is an obsession intertwined with a taste for maladies and hunger for depravities. One only troubles oneself with ...”

“If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing it.Becoming: an agony without an ending.The older I grow, the less I enjoy performing my little Hamlet....”

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

“For the normal man, life is an undisputed reality; only the sick man is delighted by life and praises it so that he won't collapse.”

“Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.”

“What they ask you for is actions, proofs, works, and all you can produce are transformed tears.”

“One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.”

“Compassion is a sign of superficiality: broken destinies and unrelenting misery either make you scream or turn you to stone.”

“That there should be a reality hidden behind appearances is, after all, quite possible; that language might render such a thing would be an absurd hope.”

“The sense that everything is going wrong has existed in every era, and rightly so since men have found no greater pleasure than in inventing new ways to make each other miserable.”

“True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.”

“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 co...”

“Only the mediocre want to die of old age. Suffer, then, drink pleasure to its last dregs, cry or laugh, scream in despair or with joy, sing about death or love, for nothing will endure! Morality ca...”

“Memories vanish when we want to remember, but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget.”

“As far back as I can remember, Ive utterly destroyed within myself the pride of being human. And I saunter to the periphery of the Race like a timorous monster, lacking the energy to claim kinship ...”

“Animal banished from life, man's condition is tragic, for he no longer finds fulfillment in life's simple values. For animals, life is all there is; for man, life is a question mark. An irreversibl...”