Emil Cioran

What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?

I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity. Yet in a less assured mood, birth seems a calamity I would be miserable not having known.

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

I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which has spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations.

When you know yourself well and do not despise yourself utterly, it is because you are too exhausted to indulge in extreme feelings.

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

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.

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

Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself; I would have shared the dignity of the abandoned gods, defending them against the insidious crosses, the invasion of servants and martyrs, and would have spent my nights seeking repose in the dementia and debauchery of the Caesars. As an expert in disenchantment, I would have riddled the new zeals with all the arrows of dissolute wisdom — with courtesans, in skeptical brothels, or in circuses with lavish forms of cruelty. I would have filled my thinking with vice and blood to stretch logic to unheard of dimensions, as large as worlds that are dying.

Balkans — that taste for devastation, for internal clutter, for a universe like a brothel on fire... the last "primitives" in Europe!

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

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

To act is to anchor in the imminent future.

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

The problem of responsibility would have a meaning only if we had been consulted before our birth and had consented to be precisely who we are.

I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.

For the man who has got in the nasty habit of unmasking appearances, event and misunderstanding are synonyms. To make for the essential is to throw up the game, to admit one is defeated.

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

Getting up in the middle of the night, I walked around my room with the certainty of being chosen and criminal, a double privilege natural to the sleepless, revolting or incomprehensible for the captives of daytime logic.

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

The feeling of being the thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity...

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

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?

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.

Consciousness is nature's nightmare.

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