Emil Cioran

Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.

You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness.

At different degrees, everything is pathology, except for indifference.

I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide.

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

Try to be free: you will die of hunger.

Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name — and moving on.

To repeat to yourself a thousand times a day: 'Nothing on Earth has any worth,' to keep finding yourself at the same point, to circle stupidly as a top, eternally...