Emil Cioran Quotes

it's impossible I should have a mind and I have one

Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

A man who has become conscious of the absurd is for ever bound to it.

I think human consciousness, is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight - brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

Nothing can save us from a perpetual headlong fall into a bottomless abyss but a solid footing of dogma; and we no sooner agree to that than we find that the only trustworthy dogma is that there is no dogma.

I know my soul hath power to know all things, Yet is she blind and ignorant in all: I know I'm one of Nature's little kings, Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall.

I say things that contradict each other, that are in real tension with each other, that compose me, that make me live, and that will make me die.

-Why does a man live? -In order to think about it.

My final belief is suffering. And I begin to believe that I do not suffer.

Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!

A mere 400 years after our fall from the center of the universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves.

There's a moment for everyone when you fall into your own shadow and the fact is that it's your shadow and you're forced to live in it. And this is nothing to celebrate or not celebrate. It simply is.

I find anger to be funny. I find people that are so wrapped up in their own personalities to be funny, and lost. Like myself in real life.

It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve.

My death and life, My bane and antidote, are both before me.

It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy--a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.

Or maybe what he fears is just the opposite: that nobody is looking; that his death, like his life, is without purpose; that there is neither greater good nor evil--only people living and dying because their bodies function and then do not; that the universe is a rip.

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.

I tell myself I bear witness. The real answer is that it's obviously my programming. And I lack the constitution for suicide.

Our own peculiar human condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh.

I fall into all kinds of inauthenticity when I conspire to forget my mortality.

Nothing ever happened - Not even this

Man is by definition the first and primary weed. Weeds are not the other. Weeds are us.

Man is a wonder to himself; he can neither govern nor know himself.