Emile M. Cioran
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.Collection: Have Faith
Humanity adores only those who cause it to perish.Collection: Humanity
Once you see that everything is unreal, you can't see why you should bother to prove it.Collection: Crazy
Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.Collection: Punishment
A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.Collection: Self
What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself.Collection: Morning
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?Collection: Girl
The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.Collection: Demand
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?Collection: Suicide
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.Collection: Powerful
We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.Collection: Want
What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.Collection: Years
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?Collection: Dream
Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.Collection: Life Sucks
Consciousness is nature's nightmare.Collection: Nightmare
What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.Collection: Reality
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Passion
He who hates himself is not humble.Collection: Hate
Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.Collection: Cancer
Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.Collection: Cynical
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.Collection: Light
I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.Collection: Dust
The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Strong
Try to be free: you will die of hunger.Collection: Trying
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."Collection: Inspire
How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.Collection: Void
Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.Collection: Inspirational
Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret.Collection: 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.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Ideas
One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.Collection: Long
How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.Collection: Self
I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.Collection: Enemy
Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.Collection: Names
There was a time when time did not yet exist.Collection: Time
I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced personCollection: Country
Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.Collection: Matter
On Creating — What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures.Collection: Eye
Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.Collection: Religious
If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.Collection: Ifs
We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.Collection: Lonely
There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.Collection: Smile
Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.Collection: Ancient
The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.Collection: Spiritual
Those who believe in their truth -- the only ones whose imprint is retained by the memory of men -- leave the earth behind them strewn with corpses. Religions number in their ledgers more murders than the bloodiest tyrannies account for, and those whom humanity has called divine far surpass the most conscientious murderers in their thirst for slaughter.Collection: Memories
We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.Collection: Believe
Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.Collection: Sad
Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.Collection: Two