504 Quotes by Emil Cioran

Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

I feel that I am dying of solitude, oflove, of despair, of hatred, of all that this world offers me. (...) Life breeds both plenitude and void, exuberance and depression. What are we when confrontedwith the interior vortex which swallows us into absurdity?

There exists, I grant you, a clinical depression, upon which certain remedies occasionally have effect; but there exists another kind, a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself.– Cioran, E. (1986). Aveux et anathèmes. (pp. 110)

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.

Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.

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...

Qu'est-ce qu'une crucifixion unique, auprès de celle, quotidienne, qu'endure l'insomniaque?

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

Vague a l'ame — melancholy yearning for the end of the world.