504 Quotes by Emil Cioran

The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty-the sideshow of second thoughts-is his rule; he offers himself.

Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves.

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

We are all geniuses when we dream.

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.

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

In most cases we attach ourselves to in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify we can do without it, that we have found something better, and we also attach ourselves to God in horror of men.

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.

Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.