Emil Cioran Quotes

Even now, as I write this, I can still feel that tightness. And I want you to feel it--the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You're at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You're twenty-one years old, you're scared, and there's a hard squeezing pressure in your chest. What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?

There's nothing wrong with me...except acute chronic fear.

Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind,Reality's dark dream!I turn from you, and listen to the wind,Which long has raved unnoticed.

Minds that are ill at ease are agitated by both hope and fear.

Solitude terrifies the soul at twenty.

No. The blues are because you're getting fat and maybe it's been raining too long, you're just sad that's all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you're afraid and you don't know what you're afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?

Fear and Guilt are the only enemies of man.

How sick i am! that thought Always comes to me with horror. Is it this strange for everybody? But such fugitive feelings have always been my metier.

We are only troubled by the fears which we, and not nature, give ourselves, for they add to the state in which we are the passions of the state in which we are not.

Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.

Guilt can make you doubt yourself at the very moment when you need to proceed with certainty.

Not treasured wealth, nor the consul's lictor, can dispel the mind's bitter conflicts and the cares that flit, like bats, about your fretted roofs.

I know a lot about fear in itself, and lived with fear a lot. Lived with anxiety a lot, lived with the things that - most human beings, at some stage in their lives, are going to live with these feelings.

I had a terror-since September -I could tell to none-and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground-because I am afraid.

Zaphod felt he was teetering on the edge of madness and wondered if he shouldn't just jump over and have done with it.

I'm horrified most of the time. I wish it was more complicated, but at the same time, each time I try to complicate it I hate it because I hate the idea of writing to impress.

He couldn't bear to live, but he couldn't bear to die. He couldn't bear the thought of he making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn't bear to keep it, but he couldn't bear to destroy it either.

The silence is perfect, and yet a torment.

Sometimes I think I'm the craziest person on the planet.

My nightmare is that I don't want to be OK.

You know that day after day of, Oh God what am I going to do with myself feeling? The fear of the emptiness that it implies keeps me going.

There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.

I felt nobody would understand what was going on in my mind.

I just think that for a lot of people - not to take the focus off of myself - that feeling of imminent dread, like a cloak of black dust, was always around me.

My soul is dark with stormy riot: directly traced over to diet.