Best 20 quotes of Emil M. Cioran on MyQuotes

A little more fervor in my nihilism and I might — gainsaying everything — shake off my doubts and triumph over them. But I have only the taste of negation, not its grace.

An inexorable law strikes and directs societies and civilisations. When, for lack of vitality, the past collapses, clinging to it serves no purpose — and yet it is this attachment to antiquated forms of life, to lost or bad causes, that makes so touching the anathemas of a de Maistre or a Bonald. Everything seems admirable and everything is false in the utopian vision; everything is execrable and everything seems true in the observations of the reactionaries.

A patrimony all our own: the hours when we have done nothing. . . . It is they that form us, that individualize us, that make us dissimilar.

As far back as I can remember, I’ve utterly destroyed within myself the pride of being human. And I saunter to the periphery of the Race like a timorous monster, lacking the energy to claim kinship with some other band of apes.

Ces idées qui survolent l'espace, et qui, tout à coup, se heurtent aux parois du crâne...

Consider carefully the merest event: in the best of cases, the positive and negative elements that participate in it balance out; generally the negatives predominate. Which is to say, it would have been preferable that it not take place. We should then have been dispensed from taking part in it, enduring it. What is the good of adding anything at all to what is or seems to be? History, a futile odyssey, has no excuse, and on occasion we are tempted to inculpate art itself, however imperious the need from which it emanates. To produce is accessory; what matters is to draw on one’s own depths, to be oneself in a total fashion, without stooping to any form of expression. To have built great cathedrals derives from the same error as to have waged great battles. Better to try to live in depth than to advance through centuries toward a débâcle.

Conversation is fruitful only between minds given to consolidating their perplexities.

Each of us is entitled to claim the forebears who suit him, who explain him in his own eyes. How often have I not changed ancestors!

Every season is an ordeal; nature changes and renews herself only in order to scourge us.

I do not struggle against the world, I struggle against a greater force, against my weariness of the world.

If you try to convert someone, it will never be to effect his salvation but to make him suffer like yourself, to be sure he is exposed to the same ordeals and endures them with the same impatience. You keep watch, you pray, you agonize-provided he does too, sighing, groaning, beset by the same tortures that are racking you. Intolerance is the work of ravaged souls whose faith comes down to a more or less deliberate torment they would like to see generalized, instituted. The happiness of others never having been a motive or principle of action, it is invoked only to appease conscience or to parade noble excuses: whenever we determine upon an action, the impulse leading to it and forcing us to complete it is almost always inadmissible. No one saves anyone; for we save only ourselves, and do so all the better if we disguise as convictions the misery we want to share, to lavish on others. However glamorous its appearances, proselytism nonetheless derives from a suspect generosity, worse in its effects than a patent aggression. No one is willing to endure alone the discipline he may even have assented to, nor the yoke he has shouldered. Vindication reverberates beneath the missionary's bonhomie, the apostle's joy. We convert not to liberate but to enchain. Once someone is shackled by a certainty, he envies your vague opinions, your resistance to dogmas or slogans, your blissful incapacity to commit yourself.

It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.

It is of no importance to know who I am since some day I shall no longer be”—that is what each of us should answer those who bother about our identity and desire at any price to coop us up in a category or a definition.

Misfits … It seems to me that their adventure, more than any other, sheds a light on the future, that they alone allow us to glimpse and to decipher it, and that if we set their exploits aside we utterly disqualify ourselves from describing the days to come.

My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out ... in me anything is possible, for I am he who at the supreme moment, in front of absolute nothingness, will laugh.

Revolutions is a sublime of bad literature.

The cynicism of utter solitude is a calvary relieved by insolence.

The more we frequent men, the blacker our thoughts; and when, to clarify them, we return to our solitude, we find there the shadow they have cast.

Though we ourselves have come too late, we shall be envied by our immediate successors, and still more by our remote descendants. In their eyes we shall have the look of privileged characters, and rightly so, for everyone wants to be as far as possible from the future.

To that friend who tells me he is bored because he cannot work, I answer that boredom is a higher state, and that we debase it by relating it to the notion of work.