Emil Cioran Quotes

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Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.

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

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?

The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.

We derive our vitality from our store of madness.

It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.

A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.

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

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.

Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

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

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.

The Universal view melts things into a blur.

Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.

Everything is pathology, except for indifference.

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.

We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.

It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.

When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.

Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?

What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?

Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.

Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.

I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.

In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.

We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.

If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.

In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.

Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.

The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.

We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.

To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel you are consubstantial with that future.

Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?

We inhabit a language rather than a country.

I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?

I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.

The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

Word - that invisible dagger.

Under each formula lies a corpse.

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.

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

My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.

God - a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.

Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.

The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.

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

A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.

Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.

You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.

Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.

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