Emil Cioran Quotes

It's like the brooding hen sitting over a china egg.

When I consider life, it is all a cheat. Yet fooled with hope, people favor this deceit.

For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.

A giant as we hoped, in truth, a dwarf; A barrel of slop that shines on Lethe's wharf', Which at first seemed a vessel with sweet wine For thirsty lips. So down the swift decline You went through sloven spirit, craven heart And cynic indolence. And here the art Of molding clay has caught you for the nonce And made your shame our shame ~ Your head in bronze!

I asked for bread, and I got a stone in the shape of a pedestal.

Drink promises you everything, but gives nothing.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg; and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.

Pilgrims who are looking for a cure are soon looking for a curio.

So many self-help ideas are like meringue - you take a big bite, and there's nothing there.

You get quick money, it's beautiful, there's sunshine, but at the end of the day, you find out it's all a masquerade, baby. It's not what it seems.

There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.

All is not gold that glitters.

If you are trying to find something, it means you haven't got it. And if you find it simply by looking for it, that means it's false.

Heaven might shine bright, but so do flames.

Yeah, they look great, but that isn't a fantasy come true, Harry. That's a wood chipper in Playboy bunny clothing.

Disillusion is the last illusion.

Traveling is a fool's paradise.

Hope lies to mortals And most believe her, But man's deceiver Was never mine.

Aren't fairy godmothers supposed to be nice and make you feel better about yourself? ...No, you're confusing fairy godmothers with sales clerks.

Good hope is often beguiled by her own augury.

I know so many who have married in the full expectation and confidence of some one particular advantage in the connection, or accomplishment, or good quality in the person, who have found themselves entirely deceived, and been obliged to put up with exactly the reverse. What is this but a take in?

Easy street is a blind alley.

The despondency that follows makes me feel somewhat like a shipwrecked man who spies a sail, sees himself saved, and suddenly remembers that the lens of his spyglass has a flaw, a blurred spot -- the sail he has seen.

All the things she planned to feel, the way she planned to look and seem, the appropriate things she planned to say. None of them came to pass.