Emil Cioran

I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.

I am enraptured by Hindu philosophy, whose essential endeavor is to surmount the self; and everything I do, everything I think is only myself and the selfs humiliations.

As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.

I was walking late one night along a tree-lined path; a chestnut fell at my feet. The noise it made as it burst, the resonance it provoked in me, and an upheaval out of all proportion to this insignificant event thrust me into miracle, into the rapture of the definitive, as if there were no more questions — only answers. I was drunk on a thousand unexpected discoveries, none of which I could make use of. This is how I nearly reached the Supreme. But instead I went on with my walk.

So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.

I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action — mother of all vices — I am the cause of no one's suffering.

Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.

The universal view melts things into a blur.

I dream of wanting — and all I want seems to me worthless.

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