504 Quotes by Emil Cioran

All great ideas should be followed by an exclamation mark – a warning signal similar to the skull and crossbones drawn on high-voltage transformers.

What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.

Trees are massacred, houses go up – faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.

As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.

Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent -unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it -we perpetuate it within ourselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude.

We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

Lucidity’s task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.

Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist-a demonic, elemental, bestial pessimist-only when life has been defeated many times in its fight against depression.