238 Quotes by Emil M. Cioran

I draw the curtains, and I wait. Actually, I am not waiting for anything, I am merely making myself absent. Scoured, if only for a few minutes, of the impurities which dim and clog the mind, I accede to a state of consciousness from which the self is evacuated, And I am as soothed as if I were resting outside the universe.

All twilights are on my side.

Getting up with my head full of plans, I would be working, I was sure of it, all morning long. No sooner had I sat down at my desk than the odious, vile, and persuasive refrain: "What do you expect of this world?" stopped me short. And I returned, as usual, to my bed with the hope of finding some answer, of going back to sleep...

There is no false sensation.

A patrimony all our own: the hours when we have done nothing. . . . It is they that form us, that individualize us, that make us dissimilar.

Each of us is entitled to claim the forebears who suit him, who explain him in his own eyes. How often have I not changed ancestors!

What right have we to be annoyed by someone who calls us a monster? The monster is unique by definition, and solitude, even the solitude of infamy, supposes something positive, a peculiar election, but undeniably an election.

In order to conquer panic or some tenacious anxiety, there is nothing like imagining your own burial. An effective method, readily available to all. In order not to have to resort to it too often in the course of a day, best to experience its benefit straight off, when you get up. Or else use it only at exceptional moments, like Pope Innocent IX, who, having commissioned a painting in which he was shown on his deathbed, glanced at it each time he had to make some important decision.

Misfits … It seems to me that their adventure, more than any other, sheds a light on the future, that they alone allow us to glimpse and to decipher it, and that if we set their exploits aside we utterly disqualify ourselves from describing the days to come.