Emil Cioran

"Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again."

"There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another."

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

"God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought."

"Existing is plagiarism."

"Impossible to accede to truth by opinions, for each opinion is only a mad perspective of reality."

"In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy."

"Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough."

"We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly."

"The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them."

"To think that so many have succeeded in dying!"

"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."

"I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end."

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

"We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything."

"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."

"Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?"

"The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?"

"I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass — which is better than trying to fill them."

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

"The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived."

"Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser."

"To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement."

"There is no false sensation."

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

"If instead of expanding you, putting you in a state of energetic euphoria, your ordeals depress and embitter you, you can be sure you have no spiritual vocation."

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

"Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day."

"Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers."

"Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!"

"Two enemies — the same man divided."

"When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment's thought to the "meaning" of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness."

"The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character — precisely that and nothing more."

"Self-knowledge — the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?"

"Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that we alone pursue the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear."

""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."

"In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left...with a foolish grin."

"If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?"

"The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich."

"Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations."

"Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral..."

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

"Nothing deserves to be undone, doubtless because nothing deserved to be done."

"Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh."

""What's wrong — what's the matter with you?" Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for..."

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

"My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are."

"Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none."

"Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying? — that void is consciousness itself."

"Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself."