Emile M. Cioran

Society: an inferno of saviors!

Maniacs of Procreation, bipeds with devalued faces, we have lost all appeal for each other.

If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame.

A book has to dig through the wounds, more, it has cause a new one, a book it has to be dangerous.

Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.

Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.

By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?

Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death!

Once you see that everything is unreal, you can't see why you should bother to prove it.

Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.

You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

For a long time—always, in fact—I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn’t able to deal with it; for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.

I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen--and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies.

Everything is pathology, except for indifference.

Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?

One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.

A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime.