Emil Cioran Quotes

When we focus on our pain, our ache deepens.

Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.

Physical pain however great ends in itself and falls away like dry husks from the mind, whilst moral discords and nervous horrors sear the soul.

I tend to play 'tortured' a lot, whether it's physically or emotionally.

Sometimes a man is intensely, even passionately, attached to suffering — that is a fact.

There's not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it.

We're tortured, a lot of us, believe me.

There are people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation.

Self-inflicted misery smirks under its crown of thorns.

For a long time that's all I could do, howl and scream and cry like the wild animal of the night that I'd become.

The various forms of despair at the various stations on the road.

The mind grows sicker than the body in contemplation of it's suffering.

I drink because I wish to multiply my sufferings.

Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.

To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!

You have so much pain inside yourself that you try & hurt yourself on the outside because you want help.

Mental anguish always results from the avoidance of legitimate suffering.

Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm.

We become imprisoned by our memories, and that makes our lives wretched.

Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.

I had never seen a woman in such despair before. It was worse than death, it was a constant longing for death and a constant rejection of life. She lived like darkness in her own day.

Each man was his own executioner and his own victim.

The pain of the mind is worse than the pain of the body.

How could I know a famished heart will eat its mind? Can kill its body?

My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as you cannot even imagine.