Emil Cioran

At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j'ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.


I ask myself; Why is it that only some people suffer? Why are only some selected from the ranks of normal people and put on the torture rack? Some religions maintain that God is trying us through suffering, or that we expiate evil and unbelief through it. If such an explanation can satisfy the religious man, it is not sufficient for anyone who notices that suffering is arbitrary and unjust, because the innocent often suffer most. There is no valid justification for suffering.


At the edge of life you feel that you are no longer master of the life within you, that subjectivity is an illusion, and that uncontrollable forces are seething inside you, evolving with no relation to a personal center or a definite, individual rhythm.

There are two kinds of mind: daylight and nocturnal. They have neither the same method nor the same morality. In broad daylight, you watch yourself; in the dark, you speak out.

Haven't people learned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles?


I don't understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn't it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?

When you no longer agree with the world, neither in thought nor in heart, run and don't stop, so that the rhythm of the steps surrounds you and makes you forget that nature is made of tears. Otherwise you will be a suicide gardener again.

How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history — greater than the fall of empires — I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.


Only those are happy who never think or, rather, who only think about life's bare necessities, and to think about such things means not to think at all...To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life, to leave behind you, as symbols of your life's drama, a trail of smoke and blood — all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you.


We cannot be normal and alive at the same time.

We hear on all sides, that if everything is pointless, to do well whatever it is you’re doing is not. Yet it is, even so. To reach this conclusion, and to endure it, you need ply no trade, or at most, a king’s – say, Solomon’s.

To live signifies to believe and hope — to lie and to lie to oneself.

I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.

However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; — unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them. The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.