Emil Cioran

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.

This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique — and insignificant.

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.

"Do I look like someone who has something to do here on Earth?" — That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.

It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should avoid simulacra and even "realities"; you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a "solitary elephant.

Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.

When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity...

Nothing deserves to be undone, doubtless because nothing deserved to be done.