Emil Cioran on Hope

"Thanks to depression — that alpinism of the indolent — we scale every summit and daydream over every precipice from our bed."

"You have dreamed of setting the world ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light up a single one!"

"Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there."

"To dream of an enterprise of demolition that would spare none of the traces of the original Big Bang."

"To Live signifies to believe and hope — to lie and to lie to oneself."

"Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream."

"I dream of wanting — and all I want seems to me worthless."

"Boredom is a larval anxiety; depression, a dreamy hatred."

"As soon as one returns to Doubt , undertaking anything at all seems not so much useless as extravagant. Doubt works deep within you like a disease, or even more effectively, like a faith."

"Hope is the normal form of delirium."

"To hope is to contradict the future."

"Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world."

"The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools."

"By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping."

"I don't understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn't it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?"

"Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith — of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever. The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth. We are unfair to a Nero, a Tiberius: it was not they who invented the concept heretic: they were only degenerate dreamers who happened to be entertained by massacres. The real criminals are men who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic."