Emil Cioran Quotes

I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

Have you no hope at all? And do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing remains?" "Yes," I said.

In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life

I think it's my job or the artist's job, to try and find some solution or some reason to accept things. But given the grimmest reality, I feel the grimmest facts are the real facts, the true facts: that you're born, you die, you suffer, it's to no purpose, and you're gone forever, ever, ever, and that's it.

That is the most extreme form of nihilism: nothingness (the "meaningless") eternally!

When you don't believe in anything except not dying, you don't really believe in anything.

There's still a thousand places I haven't gone to die.

Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.

God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don't feel so well myself.

What is my nothingness to the stupor that awaits you?

Killing myself was a matter of such indifference to me that I felt like waiting for a moment when it would make some difference.

You have to be very deep to be dead, he thought, and I'm not. He began to have some concept of forever, and his mind shivered as his body had when he had wakened in the cold nights and thrust his hands between his thighs to keep warm. It will be a long night, he thought.

...we ask: Why suicide? We search for reasons, causes, and so on.... We follow the course of the life he has now so suddenly terminated as far back as we can. For days we are preoccupied with the question: Why suicide? We recollect details. And yet we must say that everything in the suicide's life- for now we know that all his life he was a suicide, led a suicide's existence- is part of the cause, the reason, for his suicide.

We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not, or die of despair...death will sweep through all the worlds; it will be the triumph of despair, forever. The universes will all become nothing more than interlocking machines, blind and empty of thought, feeling, life...

I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.

My joy is death- Death, at whose name I oft have been afeard, Because I wish'd this world's eternity.

I gave up before birth.

You are not just a meaningless fragment in an alien universe, briefly suspended between life and death, allowed a few short-lived pleasures followed by pain and ultimate annihilation.

Everything depends on this: a fathomless sinking into a fathomless nothingness.

To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep No more; and by a sleep, to say we end The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die to sleep, To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there's the rub.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

One idea I explore in my stand-up show is whether, if you try looking at the universe rationally and avoid coping mechanisms like mysticism or religion, you can still be happy knowing you are going to die after a brief time on this spinning ball.

One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void.