All Quotes

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

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

"We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune."

"Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls."

"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?"

"Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism."

"That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit."

"What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you — what a revelation."

"To act is to anchor in the imminent future."

"Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?"

"We are all secularised anarchists today."

"Love, a tacit agreement between two unhappy parties to overestimate each other."

"There is only this swarm of dying creatures stricken with longevity, all the more hateful in that they are so good at organizing their agony."

"He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama."

"Creation is in fact a fault, man's famous sin thereby appearing as a minor version of a much graver one. What are we guilty of, except of having followed, more or less slavishly, the Creator's example? Easy to recognize in ourselves the fatality which was His: not for nothing have we issued from the hands of a wicked and woebegone god, a god accursed."

"Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence."

"“Meeting, after several years, someone we used to know as a child, the first glance almost always suggests that some great disaster must have befallen him” Leopardi, quoted by cioran."

"We should, out of decency, choose for ourselves the moment to disappear."

"Jean Paul calls the most important night of his life the one when he discovered there was no difference between dying the next day or in thirty years. A revelation as significant as it is futile; if we occasionally manage to grasp its cogency, we resist on the other hand drawing its consequences, in immediacy the difference in question seeming to each of us somehow irreducible, even absolute: to exist is to prove that we have not understood to what point it is all one and the same thing to die now or no matter when."

"The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility."

"To reckon on anything at all, here or elsewhere, is to afford proofs that we are still burdened with chains. The reprobate aspires to paradise; this aspiration disparages, compromises him. To be free is to rid yourself forever of the notion of reward, it is to expect nothing of men or gods, it is to renounce not only this world and all worlds but salvation itself—it is to destroy even the notion of it, that chain among chains."

"It is debasing to die the way one does; it is intolerable to be exposed to an end over which we have no control, an end which lies in wait for us, overthrows us, casts us into the unnameable."

"We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle."

"It is difficult, it is impossible to believe that the Good Lord — "Our Father" — had a hand in the scandal of creation. Everything suggests that He took no part in it, that it proceeds from a god without scruples, a feculent god. Goodness does not create, lacking imagination; it takes imagination to put together a world, however botched. At the very least, there must be a mixture of good and evil in order to produce an action or a work."

"In order to conceive, and to steep ourselves in, unreality, we must have it constantly present to our minds. The day we feel it, see it, everything becomes unreal, except that unreality which alone makes existence tolerable."

"Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what — it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?"

"In theory, it matters little to me whether I live as whether I die; in practice, I am lacerated by every anxiety which opens an abyss between life and death."

"maybe suffering has no more justification than life."

"No one commits suicide for external reasons, only because of inner disequilibrium. Under similar adverse circumstances, some are indifferent, some are moved, some are driven to suicide."

"I admire only two types of people: the potentially mad and the potential suicide."

"Why don't I commit suicide? Because I am as sick of death as I am of life."

"I don't need any support, advice, or compassion, because even if I am the most ruinous man, I still feel so powerful, so strong and fierce. For I am the only one that lives without hope."

"There are questions which, once approached, either isolate you or kill you outright."

"One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death's prisoner."

"Haven't people learned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles?"

"Knowledge is the plague of life, and consciousness, an open wound in its heart."

"Tears do not burn except in solitude."

"If there was a God of sorrow, he would grow black heavy wings, to soar not for the skies, but for inferno."

"What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?"

"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?"

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

"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."

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

"Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear."

"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."

"I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night."

"The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion, when the intuition of disaster is so painful that it almost provokes a greater madness [...] One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it."

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

"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."

"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."