Emil Cioran quotes:

I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.

Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.

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?

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.

I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.

Time, fertile in resources, more inventive and more charitable than we think, possesses a remarkable capacity to help us out, to afford us at any hour of the day some new humiliation.

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

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

Tolerance cannot seduce the young.

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

Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.

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 saints because one has been disappointed by the paradoxes of earthly life; one therefore searches out other paradoxes, more outlandish in guise, redolent of unknown truths, unknown perfumes..."

In somn uiti drama vietii tale uiti complicatiile si obsesiile asa incat fiecare desteptare este un inceput nou de viata este o speranta noua. Viata pastreaza astfel o discontinuitate placuta care da impresia unei continue regenerari a unei renasteri permanente.

Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.

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

Every phenomenon is a corrupt version of another, largerphenomenon: time, a disease of eternity; history, a disease oftime; life, again, a disease of matter.Then what is normal, what is healthy? Eternity? Which itselfis only an infirmity of God.

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.

N'a de convictions que celui qui n'a rien approfondi.

N'a de convictions que celui qui n'a rien approfondi

A book is a suicide postponed.

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

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

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

Femeia-i Paradisul ca noapte.