Emil Cioran Quotes Page 2

“Tears do not burn except in solitude.”

“True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.”

“We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.”

“Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”

“Life is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it.”

“Tell me how you want to die, and I’ll tell you who you are.”

“There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.”

“To fear is to die every minute.”

“Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone.”

“A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs — something, anything. Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.”

“Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on.”

“Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?

That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.”

“Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.”

“Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.”

“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”

“Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.”

“The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don’t know where that elsewhere is.”

“This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this, and I do not. Everything is unique—and insignificant.”

“To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression.
I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.”

“What do you do from morning to night?

I endure myself.”

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

“When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, “What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act.” And they do calm down.”