Emil Cioran Quotes

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

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?

What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself.

Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

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

Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.

Tears do not burn except in solitude.

لا ينتحر إلا المتفائلون، المتفائلون الذين لم يعودوا قادرين على الإستمرار فى التفاؤل. أما الآخرون، فلماذا يكون لهم مبرّر للموت وهم لا يملكون مبرّراً للحياة؟

Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.

I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?

If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.

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

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

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.

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.

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

As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?

I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?

No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.

أشعر أنني منفصل تماما عن كل البلدان وعن كل المجموعات. أنا متشرد ميتافيزيقي I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person

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

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.

To have committed every crime but that of being a father.

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

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.

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

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.

سر تكيفى مع الحياة؟ أنى أغيّر اليأس كما أغيّر القميص

I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.

I would like to be free, totaly free... free like an aborted child.

لا وجود إلا لعلامة واحدة تشهد على أننا فهمنا كل شىء: أن نبكي بلا سبب

I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.

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

We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

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.

Read day and night, devour books—these sleeping pills—not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.

How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history—greater than the fall of empires—I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.

Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.

إذا حزنت مرة دونما سبب فثِق أنك كنت حزيناً طيلة حياتك دون أن تعرف

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.

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

غموض: كلمة نستعملها لخداع الآخرين، لإيهامهم بأننا أكثر عمقاً منهم.

كلما ازدادت لا مبالاتى بالبشر تضاعفت قدرتهم على التأثير فىّ، و مهما احتقرتهم فإنى لا أستطيع الإقتراب منهم إلا متلعثماً

الموسيقى هي ملجأ الأرواح التي جرحتها السعادة

مخافة أن نتعذب، نبذل قصارى جهدنا كى نلغى الواقع، و ما أن نفلح فى ذلك حتى يتحول هذا الإلغاء نفسه إلى مصدر عذاب

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

لماذا ننسحب ونغادراللعبة مادام في وسعنا أن نخيب ظن المزيد من الكائنات

How I wish I didn't know anything about myself and this world!

Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.

Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.

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.

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose dying: Everything!

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

As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.

- من أين جاءتك ملامح الزهو هذه؟ - لقد أفلحتُ في البقاء حيًا كما ترون، على الرغم من ليال وليالٍ عشتها اسأل إن كنت سأقتل نفسي عند الفجر.

لولا الضجر لما كانت لي هوية. بفضله و بسببه وُهبت إمكانية التعرف على ذاتي …. الضجر هو إمكانية التعرف على الذات - من خلال إدراك بطلان الذات

مع التقدم فى السن يتعلم المرء مقايضة مخاوفه بقهقهاته :)))))

Only those are happy who never think or, rather, who only think about life's bare necessities, and to think about such things means not to think at all. True thinking resembles a demon who muddies the spring of life or a sickness which corrupts its roots. To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life, to leave behind you, as symbols of your life's drama, a trail of smoke and blood - all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you.

There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.

The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.

Sînt unii oameni atît de prosti, ca de le-ar aparea vreo idee la suprafata creierului ea s-ar sinucide din groaza de singuratate.

Memories vanish when we want to remember, but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget.

We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

الضحك هو المبرر الكبير للحياة! وعليَّ القول إنني، حتى في أعمق لحظات اليأس، كنت قادرا على الضحك. هذا ما يميز الإنسان عن الحيوان. الضحك ظاهرة عدمية، تماما كما يمكن للفرح أن يكون حالة مأتمية

لكلٍ جنونه، و قد تمثّل جنونى فى أن أعتبر نفسى سوياً، سوياً بشكلٍ خطِر، و لما كان الآخرون يبدون لى مجانين، فقد انتهى بى الأمر إلى الخوف منهم، و إلى الخوف منّى أكثر

Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded as a complete failure. Without Bach, God would be a complete second-rate figure.

Between the demand to be clear,and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect.

I have all the defects of other people and yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.

على المتشائم أن يخترع كل يوم أسباباً أخرى للإستمرار فى الوجود: إنه ضحية من ضحايا (معنى) الحياة.

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

A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society

لا يرقي إلي الجنون إلا الثرثارون والصموتون الذين أفرغوا أنفسهم من الأسرار كلها و الذين أفرطوا في تخزينها

For animals, life is all there is; for man, life is a question mark. An irreversible question mark, for man has never found, nor will ever find, any answers. Life not only has no meaning; it can never have one.

Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.

We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job...

لا يستطيع أحد أن يحرس عزلته إذا لم يعرف كيف يكون بغيضًا.

To accomplish nothing and die of the strain

We must learn how to explode! Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage.

Eu nu am idei ci obsesii. Idei poate avea oricine. Nimeni nu s-a prăbușit din cauza ideilor.

إن الأرق وعي مدوخ قادر علي تحويل الفردوس إلي غرفة تعذيب

How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.

If I used to ask myself, over a coffin: “What good did it do the occupant to be born?”, I now put the same question about anyone alive.

Câtă viaţă ai pus în gânduri, atâta moarte este în tine.

I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.

I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.

The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.

Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?

I hate wise men because they are lazy, cowardly, and prudent. To the philosophers' equanimity, which makes them indifferent to both pleasure and pain, I prefer devouring passions. The sage knows neither the tragedy of passion, nor the fear of death, nor risk and enthusiasm, nor barbaric, grotesque, or sublime heroism. He talks in proverbs and gives advice. He does not live, feel, desire, wait for anything. He levels down all the incongruities of life and then suffers the consequences. So much more complex is the man who suffers from limitless anxiety. The wise man's life is empty and sterile, for it is free from contradiction and despair. An existence full of irreconcilable contradictions is so much richer and creative. The wise man's resignation springs from inner void, not inner fire. I would rather die of fire than of void.

There are no arguments. Can anyone who has reached the limit bother with arguments, causes, effects, moral considerations, and so forth? Of course not. For such a person there are only unmotivated motives for living. On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos. When all the current reasons—moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on—no longer guide one's life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.

In itself, every idea is neutral, or should be; but man animates ideas, projects his flames and flaws into them; impure, transformed into beliefs, ideas take their place in time, take shape as events: the trajectory is complete, from logic to epilepsy . . . whence the birth of ideologies, doctrines, deadly games. Idolaters by instinct, we convert the objects of our dreams and our interests into the Unconditional. History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable. Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create fake gods, he feverishly adopts them: his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.

We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good—have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us. What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: “If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world. …” And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.

Niciodată nu te voi trăda de tot, deşi te-am trădat şi te voi trăda la fiecare pas; Când te-am urât nu te-am putut uita; Te-am blestemat, ca să te suport; Te-am refuzat, ca să te schimbi; Te-am chemat şi n-ai venit, am urlat şi nu mi-ai zâmbit, am fost trist şi nu m-ai mângâiat. Am plâns şi nu mi-ai îndulcit lacrimile. Deşert ai fost rugăminţilor mele. Ucis-am în gând întâia clipă a vieţii şi fulgerat-am începuturile tale, secetă în fructe, uscăciune în flori şi secarea izvoarelor dorit-a sufletul meu. Dar recunoscător îţi este sufletul meu pentru zâmbetul ce l-a văzut doar el şi nimeni altul; recunoscător pentru acea întâlnire, de nimeni aflată; acea întâlnire nu se uită, ci cu credinţa ascunsă în tine răsună în tăcere, înverzeşte pustiuri, îndulceşte lacrimi şi înseninează singurătăţi. Îţi jur că niciodată nu vei cunoaşte marea mea trădare. Jur pe tot ce poate fi mai sfânt: pe zâmbetul tău, că nu mă voi despărţi niciodată de tine.

There are people who are destined to taste only the poison in things, for whom any surprise is a painful surprise and any experience a new occasion for torture. if someone were to say to me that such suffering has subjective reasons, related to the individual's particular makeup, i would then ask; is there an objective criterion for evaluating suffering? who can say with precision that my neighbor suffers more than i do or that jesus suffered more than all of us? there is no objective standard because suffering cannot be measured according to the external stimulation or local irritation of the organism, but only as it is felt and reflected in consciousness. alas, from this point of view, any hierarchy is out of the question. each person remains with his own suffering, which he believes absolute and unlimited. how much would we diminish our own personal suffering if we were to compare it to all the world's sufferings until now, to the most horrifying agonies and the most complicated tortures, the mostcruel deaths and the most painful betrayals, all the lepers, all those burned alive or starved to death? nobody is comforted in his sufferings by the thought that we are all mortals, nor does anybody who suffers really find comfort in the past or present suffering of others. because in this organically insufficient and fragmentary world, the individual is set to live fully, wishing to make of his own existence an absolute.

What would happen if a man's face could adequately express his suffering, if his entire inner agony would be objectified in his facial expression? Could we still communicate? Wouldn't we then cover our faces with our hands while talking? Life would really be impossible if the infinitude of feelings we harbor within ourselves would be fully expressed in the lines of our face. Nobody would dare look at himself in the mirror, because a grotesque, tragic image would mix in the contours of his face with stains and traces of blood, wounds which cannot be healed, and unstoppable streams of tears. I would experience a kind of voluptuous awe if I could see a volcano of blood, eruptions as red as fire and as burning as despair, burst into the comfortable and superficial harmony of everyday life, or if I could see all our hidden wounds open, making of us a bloody eruption forever. Only then would be truly understand and appreciate the advantages of loneliness, which silences our suffering and makes it inaccessible. The venom drawn out from suffering would be enough to poison the whole world in a bloody eruption, bursting out of the volcano of our being. There is so much venom, so much poison, in suffering!

Everything is possible, and yet nothing is. All is permitted, and yet again, nothing. No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent. There is an explanation for everything, and yet there is none. Everything is both real and unreal, normal and absurd, splendid and insipid. There is nothing worth more than anything else, nor any idea better than any other. Why grow sad from one’s sadness and delight in one’s joy? What does it matter whether our tears come from pleasure or pain? Love your unhappiness and hate your happiness, mix everything up, scramble it all! Be a snowflake dancing in the air, a flower floating downstream! Have courage when you don’t need to, and be a coward when you must be brave! Who knows? You may still be a winner! And if you lose, does it really matter? Is there anything to win in this world? All gain is a loss, and all loss is a gain. Why always expect a definite stance, clear ideas, meaningful words? I feel as if I should spout fire in response to all the questions which were ever put, or not put, to me.