504 Quotes by Emil Cioran

The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.

What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.

The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are.

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose dying: Everything!

To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.

I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher’s the poet’s equal there.

I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.