374 Quotes by Emile M. Cioran

An individual dies ... when, instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being, he cowers within, and takes refuge there.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.

No human beings are more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief

Utopia is the grotesque en rose, the need to associate happiness -- that is, the improbable -- with becoming, and to coerce an optimistic, aerial vision to the point where it rejoins its own source: the very cynicism it sought to combat. In short, a monstrous fantasy.

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

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.