Emil Cioran

We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

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.

To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.

For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.

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

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?

Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.

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

The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.

Word - that invisible dagger.

I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.

We inhabit a language rather than a country.

A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

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

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

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

To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

Everything is pathology, except for indifference.

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

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

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

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.

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

The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.

Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.

One should live and die where one was born... I've been bored everywhere I went. What was the point of leaving Coasta Boacu?

Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.

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

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.

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

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.

Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.

The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.

We derive our vitality from our store of madness.

You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.

Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.

Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.