Emile M. Cioran

Try to be free: you will die of hunger.

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.

Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.

Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.

Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.

It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say “we" with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke "others" and regard himself as their interpreter - for me to consider him my enemy.

What a pity that 'nothingness' has been devalued by an abuse of it made by philosophers unworthy of it!

If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.

On Creating — What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures.

Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.

Pursued by our origins... we all are.

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.

I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.

Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.

A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.

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.