E. M. Cioran Quotes

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E. M. Cioran Quotes (Emile M. Cioran Quotes)

Type:
Philosopher Quotes
Category:
French Philosopher Quotes
Date of Birth:
April 8, 1911
Year of Death:
1995
Nationality:
French
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E. M. Cioran

Related Authors:
Blaise Pascal
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Jean-Paul Sartre
Albert Camus
Michel de Montaigne
Peter Abelard
Gaston Bachelard
Simone Weil
Charles de Montesquieu

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 the imminent 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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