E. M. Cioran Quotes (Emile M. Cioran Quotes)
A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
Emile M. Cioran
A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
Emile M. Cioran
A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
Emile M. Cioran
A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
Emile M. Cioran
A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
Emile M. Cioran
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.
Emile M. Cioran
Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
Emile M. Cioran
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
Emile M. Cioran
Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.
Emile M. Cioran
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
Emile M. Cioran
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.
Emile M. Cioran
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
Emile M. Cioran
Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
Emile M. Cioran
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
Emile M. Cioran
Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.
Emile M. Cioran
Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
Emile M. Cioran
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
Emile M. Cioran
Everything is pathology, except for indifference.
Emile M. Cioran
For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
Emile M. Cioran
Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?
Emile M. Cioran
God - a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
Emile M. Cioran
Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.
Emile M. Cioran
I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
Emile M. Cioran
I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.
Emile M. Cioran
I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
Emile M. Cioran
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
Emile M. Cioran
If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
Emile M. Cioran
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.
Emile M. Cioran
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.
Emile M. Cioran
In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
Emile M. Cioran
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
Emile M. Cioran
In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
Emile M. Cioran
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
Emile M. Cioran
Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
Emile M. Cioran
It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.
Emile M. Cioran
It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
Emile M. Cioran
Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.
Emile M. Cioran
Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
Emile M. Cioran
Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
Emile M. Cioran
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
Emile M. Cioran
Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.
Emile M. Cioran
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
Emile M. Cioran
Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
Emile M. Cioran
My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.
Emile M. Cioran
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.
Emile M. Cioran
No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
Emile M. Cioran
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
Emile M. Cioran
Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.
Emile M. Cioran
Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
Emile M. Cioran
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.
Emile M. Cioran
One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
Emile M. Cioran
Our first intuitions are the true ones.
Emile M. Cioran
Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.
Emile M. Cioran
Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
Emile M. Cioran
Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
Emile M. Cioran
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
Emile M. Cioran
Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.
Emile M. Cioran
Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
Emile M. Cioran
Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
Emile M. Cioran
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
Emile M. Cioran
So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.
Emile M. Cioran
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
Emile M. Cioran
Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
Emile M. Cioran
Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.
Emile M. Cioran
The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
Emile M. Cioran
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
Emile M. Cioran
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.
Emile M. Cioran
The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
Emile M. Cioran
The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.
Emile M. Cioran
The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
Emile M. Cioran
The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.
Emile 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.
Emile M. Cioran
The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.
Emile M. Cioran
The Universal view melts things into a blur.
Emile M. Cioran
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
Emile M. Cioran
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.
Emile M. Cioran
To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.
Emile M. Cioran
To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.
Emile M. Cioran
To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.
Emile M. Cioran
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
Emile M. Cioran
Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
Emile M. Cioran
Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
Emile M. Cioran
Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.
Emile M. Cioran
Under each formula lies a corpse.
Emile M. Cioran
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
Emile M. Cioran
We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
Emile M. Cioran
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.
Emile M. Cioran
We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
Emile M. Cioran
We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
Emile M. Cioran
We inhabit a language rather than a country.
Emile M. Cioran
We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.
Emile M. Cioran
We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
Emile M. Cioran
We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
Emile M. Cioran
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
Emile M. Cioran
What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.
Emile M. Cioran
What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.
Emile M. Cioran
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
Emile M. Cioran
When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
Emile M. Cioran
Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
Emile M. Cioran
Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
Emile M. Cioran
Word - that invisible dagger.
Emile M. Cioran
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
Emile M. Cioran
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.
Emile M. Cioran
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