The deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life.

— Emil M. Cioran

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it, I have sacrificed everything, even death.

— Emil M. Cioran

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.

— Emil M. Cioran

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live-moreover, the only one.

— Emil M. Cioran

The more we frequent men, the blacker our thoughts; and when, to clarify them, we return to our solitude, we find there the shadow they have cast.

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

The one who had not ever conceived his own annulment, who had not foreseen the resource of the cord, the bullet, the poison or the sea, is a debased prisoner or a crawling worm on the cosmic carrion. This world can take off us everything, it can forbid us everything, but nobody can't prevent us our self-abolition.

— Emil M. Cioran

The only successful philosophies and religions are the ones that flatter us, whether in the name of progress or of hell. Damned or not, man experiences an absolute need to be at the heart of everything.

— Emil M. Cioran

There are people who are destined to taste only the poison in things, for whom any surprise is a painful surprise and any experience a new occasion for torture. If someone were to say to me that such suffering has subjective reasons, related to the individual's particular makeup, I would then ask; is there an objective criterion for evaluating suffering? Who can say with precision that my neighbor suffers more than I do or that Jesus suffered more than all of us? There is no objective standard because suffering cannot be measured according to the external stimulation or local irritation of the organism, but only as it is felt and reflected in consciousness. Alas, from this point of view, any hierarchy is out of the question. Each person remains with his own suffering, which he believes absolute and unlimited. How much would we diminish our own personal suffering if we were to compare it to all the world's sufferings until now, to the most horrifying agonies and the most complicated tortures, the most cruel deaths and the most painful betrayals, all the lepers, all those burned alive or starved to death? Nobody is comforted in his sufferings by the thought that we are all mortals, nor does anybody who suffers really find comfort in the past or present suffering from others. Because in this organically insufficient and fragmentary world, the individual is set to live fully, wishing to make of his own existence an absolute.

— Emil M. Cioran

The sense that everything is going wrong has existed in every era, and rightly so since men have found no greater pleasure than in inventing new ways to make each other miserable.

— Emil M. Cioran