Emile M. Cioran Quotes

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.

To hope is to contradict the future.

Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.

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

One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.

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

Humanity adores only those who cause it to perish.

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

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

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

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

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?

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.

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