Emil M. Cioran Quotes

Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.

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

Animal banished from life, man's condition is tragic, for he no longer finds fulfillment in life's simple values. 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.

What they ask you for is actions, proofs, works, and all you can produce are transformed tears.

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle. . .

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

Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.