Emil Cioran

If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.

Buddhism calls anger "corruption of the mind," Manicheism "root of the tree of death." I know this, but what good does it do me to know?

The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools.

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.

If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.

There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books.

The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?

When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment's thought to the "meaning" of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.

As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.

No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.

We say: he has no talent, only tone. But tone is precisely what cannot be invented — we're born with it. Tone is an inherited grace, the privilege some of us have of making our organic pulsations felt — tone is more than talent, it is its essence.