Emil Cioran

We had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy.

It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.

The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left...with a foolish grin.

I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.

The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.

Two enemies — the same man divided.

We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.

We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good — have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us. What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: "If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world. …" And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.

"What's wrong — what's the matter with you?" Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for...

I used to ask myself, over a coffin: “What good did it do the occupant to be born?,” I now put the same question about anyone alive.