noor > noor's Quotes

“Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?”
― Emil Cioran

“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, On the Heights of Despair

“What do you do from morning to night?"

"I endure myself.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.”
― Emil Cioran

“As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”
― Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints

“Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.”
― Emil Cioran, All Gall is Divided: Aphorisms

“Tears do not burn except in solitude.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone.”
― Émile Michel Cioran, The New Gods

“We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“If we could truly see ourselves the way others see us we'd disappear on the spot.”
― Émile Michel Cioran

“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.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Only those are happy who never think or, rather, who only think about life's bare necessities, and to think about such things means not to think at all. True thinking resembles a demon who muddies the spring of life or a sickness which corrupts its roots. To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life, to leave behind you, as symbols of your life's drama, a trail of smoke and blood - all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, “What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act.” And they do calm down.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“To have committed every crime but that of being a father.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this, and I do not. Everything is unique—and insignificant.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on.

Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“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.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“If 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.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength--life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“Nothing more to pursue, except the pursuit of nothing.”
― Emil Cioran, The Temptation to Exist

“Every work turns against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action. Destruction awaits anyone who, answering to his vocation and fulfilling it, exerts himself within history; only the man who sacrifices every gift and talent escapes: released from his humanity, he may lodge himself in Being. (...) One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.”
― Emil Cioran, The Temptation to Exist

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero