Emil Cioran on Philosophy

"Philosophy offers an antidote to melancholy. And many still believe in the depth of philosophy!"

"The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy."

"Neither this world, nor the next, nor happiness are for the being abandoned to doubt." — This point in the Gita is my death sentence."

"A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people."

"Death poses a problem which replaces all the others. What is deadly to philosophy, to the naive belief in the hierarchy of perplexities."

"I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness."

"Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself."

"Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying? — that void is consciousness itself."

"Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing — between two fictions."

"The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor."

"Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise."

"I am enraptured by Hindu philosophy, whose essential endeavor is to surmount the self; and everything I do, everything I think is only myself and the selfs humiliations."

"What is marvelous is that each day brings us a new reason to disappear."

"Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred."

"Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself."

"Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas."

"To have committed every crime but that of being a father."

"No one commits suicide for external reasons, only because of inner disequilibrium. Under similar adverse circumstances, some are indifferent, some are moved, some are driven to suicide."

"Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others."

"Philosophy's error is to be too endurable."

"Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?"

"Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?"

"To try curing someone of a "vice," of what is the deepest thing he has, is to attack his very being, and this is indeed how he himself understands it, since he will never forgive you for wanting him to destroy himself in your way and not his."

"The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know where that elsewhere is."

"A man does not kill himself, as is commonly supposed, in a fit of madness but rather in a fit of unendurable lucidity, in a paroxysm which may, if so desired, be identified with madness; for an excessive perspicacity, carried to the limit and of which one longs to be rid at all costs, exceeds the context of reason."

"Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being."

"Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation."