Emile M. Cioran

What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.

We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.

No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.

Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.

The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.

The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.

In most cases we attach ourselves to in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify we can do without it, that we have found something better, and we also attach ourselves to God in horror of men.

Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor and revolt, a perplexity on fire.

Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.

To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.

For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

All philosophers should end their days at Pythia's feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.

No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity; – for thoughts, there is always time; life has its time; there is no thought that comes too late; any desire can become a regret.

Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.

To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel you are consubstantial with that future.

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.

The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.