Émile Michel Cioran: Zitate auf Englisch

“It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”

“I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away.”

“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?”

“Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.”

“The farther men get from God, the farther they advance into the knowledge of religions.”

“When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.”

“We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die. - Didn't you know that's how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?”

“I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide.”

“A book is a suicide postponed.”

“There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another.”

“In theory, it matters little to me whether I live as whether I die; in practice, I am lacerated by every anxiety which opens an abyss between life and death.”

“"What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself."”

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

“Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.”

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

“Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.”

“Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence.”

“The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness.”

“Only optimists commit suicide, the optimists who can no longer be... optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?”