Emil Cioran Quotes

I don't think suicide is so terrible. Some rainy winter Sundays when there's a little boredom, you should always carry a gun. Not to shoot yourself, but to know exactly that you're always making a choice.

...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.

Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.

Money gives you the power to do whatever you want to do. I like the idea of being in complete control of my life.

There was a moment in my life when I really wanted to kill myself. And there was one other moment when I was close to that. But even in my most jaded times, I had some hope.

How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.

You are certainly wrong to compare suicide ... with great accomplishments, since it cannot be considered as anything but a weakness. After all, it is easier to die than to endure a harrowing life with fortitude.

A man who is willing to commit suicide has the initiative.

I never felt like dying was a good idea.

the first thing I did when I made the decision to kill myself was to stop dieting. Let them dig a wider hole.

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

I think suicide is the most perfect thing you can do in life.

I really wanted to die at certain periods in my life.

I start thinking about life after death. I've got to quit thinking about it because it's very deep. Very deep. Sometimes you start thinking about it, and you don't feel like you want to be alive, so I don't like to get all quiet.

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

I believe in the freedom of choice in both life and death.

The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.

Your one certainty in life, your power as a human being, is that you have a choice in every situation about what you do next and about how you take what has happened to you.

The man, who in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.

Estragon: What about hanging ourselves? Vladimir: Hmm. It'd give us an erection.

When you commit your life to something and it doesn't work out, it is a tough place to be. Suicide can be the spiritual reprieve of a faithless person. I knew I could always just end it, and there was solace in that.

A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool.

One way we could describe the struggle of life would be to say it is a battle between agency and addiction. Agency is our power to choose, and addiction is what happens when we have lost that power and we are controlled by something else.

Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.

[I] have fantasies of killing myself and thus being the powerful one not the powerless one.