504 Quotes by Emil Cioran

When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.

We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.

This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique – and insignificant.

Word – that invisible dagger.

My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission.

What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?

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