Emil Cioran on Life

"No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive."

"Life is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it."

"Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?"

"Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved."

"Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence."

"We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence."

"I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away."

"The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning."

"Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude."

"I used to ask myself, over a coffin: “What good did it do the occupant to be born?,” I now put the same question about anyone alive."

"I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the Gods have been against me."

"A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It's not easy to be on the wrong foot with life"

"We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly."

"Everyone must destroy their life. According to the way they do it, they're either triumphants or failures."

"What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!"

"Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none."

"The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life."

"To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!"

"Do I look like someone who has something to do here on Earth?" — That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities."

"The advantage of meditating upon life and death is being able to say anything at all about them."

"Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul."

"Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach."

"One disgust, then another — to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind...The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive."

"Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion."

"If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing."

"One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death's prisoner."

"Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life."

"We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything."

"The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief."

"The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility."