If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing it. Becoming: an agony without an ending. The older I grow, the less I enjoy performing my little Hamlet. The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it, I have sacrificed everything, even death. If History had a goal, how lamentable would be the fate of those of us who have accomplished nothing! On the frontiers of the self: ‘What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I’. Events - tumors of time. Man secretes disaster. The secret of my adaptation to life? - I’ve changed despairs the way I’ve changed shirts. Each day is a Rubicon in which I aspire to be drowned.

— Emil M. Cioran

I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.

— Emil M. Cioran

If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.

— Emil M. Cioran

If you try to convert someone, it will never be to effect his salvation but to make him suffer like yourself, to be sure he is exposed to the same ordeals and endures them with the same impatience. You keep watch, you pray, you agonize-provided he does too, sighing, groaning, beset by the same tortures that barracking you. Intolerance is the work of ravaged souls whose faith comes down to a more or less deliberate torment they would like to see generalized, instituted. The happiness of others never having been a motive or principle of action, it is invoked only to appease conscience or to parade noble excuses: whenever redetermine upon an action, the impulse leading to stand forcing us to complete it is almost always inadmissible. No one saves anyone; for we save only ourselves, and do so all the better if we disguise as convictions the misery we want to share, to lavish on others. However, glamorous its appearances, proselytism nonetheless derives from a suspect generosity, worse in its effects than a patent aggression. No ones willing to endure alone the discipline he may even have assented to, nor the yoke he has shouldered. Vindication reverberates beneath the missionary'bonhomie, the apostle's joy. We convert not to liberate but to enchain. Once someone is shackled by a certainty, he envies your vague opinions, your resistance to dogmas or slogans, your blissful incapacity to commit yourself.

— Emil M. Cioran

I hate wise men because they are lazy, cowardly, and prudent. To the philosophers' equanimity, which makes them indifferent to both pleasure and pain, I prefer devouring passions. The sage knows neither the tragedy of passion, nor the fear of death, nor risk and enthusiasm nor barbaric, grotesque, or sublime heroism. He talks in proverbs and gives advice. He does not live, feel, desire, wait for anything. Furthermore, he levels down all the incongruities of life and then suffers the consequences. So much more complex is the man who suffers from limitless anxiety. The wise man's life is empty and sterile, for it is free from contradiction and despair. An existence full of irreconcilable contradictions is so much richer and creative. The wise man's resignation springs from inner void, not inner fire. I would rather die of fire than of void.

— Emil M. Cioran

I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened, and I have seen--and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies.

— Emil M. Cioran

IL NE wait autumn route pour moi Que la sages est LE but principal de la vie et c'est pourquoi JE reviews tours aux Stoicisms. ILS ONT attack la sages, on né put done plus LES appear DES philosophes Au sens proper Du term. Demon point de Vue, la sages est LE term natural de la philosophies, SA fin days LES DEU sens Du mot. One philosophies finite en sages et par LA meme disparate.

— Emil M. Cioran

In namely is sub Terceira a (plictiselii, n.m.) phrases Armenia Camino is Martha Arabia legate de el is S6 Avant in Luke, sure a MRI under far covers is far Karimi; adolescent ii see Andes la sinucideri in mile infinite de Primavera, air serviceable far Amati see lamented domicile, de PARC minima lore un Dimitri in care Martin nu pot dorm.

— Emil M. Cioran

It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: In truth it is itself the quintessence of injustice.

— Emil M. Cioran

It is no sign of benediction to have been obsessed with the lives of saints, for it is an obsession intertwined with a taste for maladies and hunger for depravities. One only troubles oneself with saints because one has been disappointed by the paradoxes of earthly life; one therefore searches out other paradoxes, more outlandish in guise, redolent of unknown truths, unknown perfumes...

— Emil M. Cioran