Emil Cioran quotes - page 6

Why don't I commit suicide? Because I am as sick of death as I am of life.. (Emil Cioran)
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. View quote
Emil Cioran
We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly. View quote
Emil Cioran
The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell. View quote
Emil Cioran
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? View quote
Emil Cioran
Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived. View quote
Emil Cioran
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. View quote
Emil Cioran
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. View quote
Emil Cioran
Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me. View quote
Emil Cioran
Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home? View quote
Emil Cioran
There was a time when time did not yet exist. ... The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time. (Emil Cioran)
The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla. View quote
Emil Cioran
My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are. View quote
Emil Cioran
I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws. View quote
Emil Cioran
What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots. View quote
Emil Cioran
When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever. View quote
Emil Cioran
The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy? View quote
Emil Cioran
My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission. View quote
Emil Cioran
The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous. View quote
Emil Cioran
Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us. View quote
Emil Cioran
Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it. (Emil Cioran)
I was walking late one night along a tree-lined path; a chestnut fell at my feet. The noise it made as it burst, the resonance it provoked in me, and an upheaval out of all proportion to this insignificant event thrust me into miracle, into the rapture of the definitive, as if there were no more questions-only answers. I was drunk on a thousand unexpected discoveries, none of which I could make use of. ... This is how I nearly reached the Supreme. But instead I went on with my walk. View quote
Emil Cioran
What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures? View quote
Emil Cioran
Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates. View quote
Emil Cioran
Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence. View quote
Emil Cioran