Emil Cioran on Suffering

"It is not by genius, it is by suffering, and suffering alone, that one ceases to be a marionette."

"To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!"

"In order to deceive melancholy, you must keep moving. Once you stop, it wakens, if in fact it has ever dozed off."

"To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously."

"The worst is not ennui nor despair but their encounter, their collision. To be crushed between the two!"

"The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell."

"We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void."

"Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it."

"There are questions which, once approached, either isolate you or kill you outright."

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

"Endless brooding over a question undermines you as much as a dull pain."

"Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity."

"If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!"