Emile M. Cioran World Quotations

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.

To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life.

Vague a l'ame — melancholy yearning for the end of the world.

The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?

Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other.

True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.

I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity.

Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.

I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.

To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.

The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.