238 Quotes by Emil M. Cioran

If you are doomed to devour yourself, nothing can keep you from it: a trifle will impel you as much as a tragedy. Resign yourself to erosion at all times: your fate wills it so.

We know, we feel that everything has been said, that there is nothing left to say. But we feel less that this truth affords language a strange, even unsettling status which redeems it. Words are ultimately saved because they have ceased living.

Every season is an ordeal; nature changes and renews herself only in order to scourge us.

Man will not last. Ambushed by exhaustion, he will have to pay for his too-original career. For it would be inconceivable and contra naturam that he drag on much longer and come to a good end. This prospect is depressing, hence likely.

The flayed man as theoretician of detachment...The convulsionary as skeptic...

X maintains we are at the end of a "cosmic cycle" and that soon everything will fall apart. And he does not doubt this for one moment. At the same time, he is the father of a--numerous--family. With certitudes like his, what aberration has deluded him into bringing into a doomed world one child after the next? If we foresee the End, if we are sure it will be coming soon, if we even anticipate it, better to do so alone. One does not procreate on Patmos.

My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconscious, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

Since we remember clearly only our ordeals, it is ultimately the sick, the persecuted, the victims in every realm who will have lived to the best advantage. The others - the lucky ones - have a life, of course, but not the memory of life.

I feel I am free but I know I am not.