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?

Emil Cioran

Je ne lutte pas contre le monde, je lutte contre une force plus grande, contre ma fatigue du monde.

Emil Cioran, Ébauches du vertige

Gli uomini seguono soltanto chi regala loro illusioni. Non ci sono mai stati assembramenti intorno a un disilluso.

Emil Cioran

Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

Emil Cioran

Anna Laughlin (Dorothy) and Arthur Hill (Cowardly Lion) in the 1902 ‘The Wizard of Oz‘ musical

“Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself.” - Emil Cioran, ‘Drawn and Quartered’ (1979) [p. 87]

To be free is to emancipate oneself from the pursuit of a destiny, to give up belonging to either the chosen or the outcast; to be free is to practice being nothing

Emil Cioran, The Fall Into Time

“Each generation raises monuments to the executioners of the one which preceded it.”

— E. M. Cioran in his essay on Napoleon, the executioner of the 18th century world. From “Ennui of Conquerors” in A Short History of Decay

“He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.”

— Emil Cioran, “The Fall Into Time”

L’espoir est la forme normale du délire.

Emil Cioran, Ébauches du vertige

“And do we not bury our fear of that ‘one day...’ between dampness and dream, the ‘one day...’ from which an actual cemetery will heal us in due course?”

Cioran on love

When every man has realised that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.

E.M Cioran

“In an English magazine, a diatribe against Marcus Aurelius, whom the author accuses of hypocrisy, philistinism, and posturing. Furious, I was on the verge of writing a reply when, thinking of the Emperor, I quickly got hold of myself. It was only fair that I should not yield to anger in the name of one who taught me never to yield to anger.” - Emil Cioran, ‘Drawn and Quartered’ (1979) [p. 78]

Fear defines us to such a degree that we no longer notice its presence, except when it withdraws or relents, those serene intervals which it nevertheless impregnates and which reduce happiness to a mild, an agreeable anxiety. Auxiliary of the future, fear stimulates us and, by keeping us from living in unison with ourselves, obliges us to assert ourselves by running away. No one can forgo fear if he wants to act; only the man delivered from it can celebrate a double triumph: over fear and over himself, for he has abdicated both his quality and his task as a man, and no longer participates in that terror-swollen duration, that gallop through the centuries which a form of dread has imposed upon us, a fear of which we are, in short, the object and the cause.

Emil Cioran, The Fall Into Time