Emile M. Cioran Quotes

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.

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

Basis of society: anonymous sweat.

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

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

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

Hungarian Language - savage it may be but of a beauty that has nothing human about it, with sonorities of another universe, powerful and corrosive, appropriate to prayer, to groans and to tears, risen out of hell to perpetuate its accent and its aura ... words of nectar and cyanide.

I do not want to see BP nickel and diming these businesses that are having a tough time.

No one can keep his griefs in their prime; they use themselves up.

Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.

To Foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by the hatred smothered within.

An individual dies ... when, instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being, he cowers within, and takes refuge there.

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

When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.

To live ... in any sense of the word ... is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence.

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

Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.

What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.

"The Holy Ghost," Luther instructs us, "is not a skeptic." Not everyone can be, and that is really too bad.

Everything is pathology, except for indifference.

Boredom dismantles the mind, renders it superficial, out at the seams, saps it from within and dislocates it.

He who hates himself is not humble.

Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.

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

Society: an inferno of saviors!

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

Under each formula lies a corpse.

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

The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.

My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission.

Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.

Discretion is deadly to genius; ruinous to talent.

The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.

To hope is to contradict the future.

The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.

The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are.

Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice.

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

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

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.

Try to be free: you will die of hunger.

Those who believe in their truth
the only ones whose imprint is retained by the memory of men
leave the earth behind them strewn with corpses. Religions number in their ledgers more murders than the bloodiest tyrannies account for, and those whom humanity has called divine far surpass the most conscientious murderers in their thirst for slaughter.

Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent -unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it -we perpetuate it within ourselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude.

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.

Humanity adores only those who cause it to perish.

Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.

My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

Existing is plagiarism.

All great ideas should be followed by an exclamation mark - a warning signal similar to the skull and crossbones drawn on high-voltage transformers.

Man started out on the wrong foot. The misadventure in paradise was the first consequence. The rest had to follow.

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

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

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

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.

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

You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.

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

Once you see that everything is unreal, you can't see why you should bother to prove it.

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

On Creating - What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures.

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

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

Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.

The Universal view melts things into a blur.

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.

That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.

We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.

Pursued by our origins ... we all are.

Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.

To act is to anchor in the imminent future.

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

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

I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.

What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.

The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.

To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer. As soon as they consent to live, the unbeliever and the man of faith are fundamentally the same, since both have made the only decision that defines a being.

Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.

What a pity that 'nothingness' has been devalued by an abuse of it made by philosophers unworthy of it!

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

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

A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It's not easy to be on the wrong foot with life

We derive our vitality from our store of madness.

The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. Why call him a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot.

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

Just as ecstasy purifies you of the particular and the contingent, leaving nothing except light and darkness, so insomnia kills off the multiplicity and diversity of the world, leaving you prey to your private obsessions.

By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?

Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

Consider love: is there a nobler outpouring, a rapture less suspect? Its shudders rival music, compete with the tears of solitude and of ecstasy: sublime ... but a sublimity inseperable from the urinary tract: transports bordering upon excretion, a heaven of the glands, sudden sancitity of the orifices. It takes no more than a moment of attention for this intoxication, shaken, to cast you back into the ordures of physiology or a moment of fatigue to recognize that so much ardor produces only a variety of mucous.

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

Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.

My enthusiasms ... constitute my reserves, my unexploited resources, perhaps my future.

Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor and revolt, a perplexity on fire.

Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.

Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise.