Emil Cioran on Death

"As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it."

"Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me."

"There is only this swarm of dying creatures stricken with longevity, all the more hateful in that they are so good at organizing their agony."

"The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death."

"We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die. — Didn't you know that's how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?"

"What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!"

"There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another."

"If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action."

"I think of so many people who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death."

"To think that so many have succeeded in dying!"

"The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it. Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?"

"The terrifying experience and obsession of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of yourself. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness."

"Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral..."