Emile M. Cioran quotes:

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share
  • The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

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

  • 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.

  • No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

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

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

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

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

  • 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.

  • Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

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

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

  • Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.

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

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

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

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

  • No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.

  • To act is to anchor in the imminent future.

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

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

  • If you lack the power to demoralize yourself along with the age, to go as low and as far, do not complain of being misunderstood by it.

  • 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.

  • The universal view melts things into a blur.

  • The amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its profundity.

  • 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.

  • What necessity impels a writer who has produced fifty books to write still one more? Why this proliferation, this fear of being forgotten, this debased coquetry?

  • Word - that invisible dagger.

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

  • Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

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

  • A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.

  • The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty-the sideshow of second thoughts-is his rule; he offers himself.

  • Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist-a demonic, elemental, bestial pessimist-only when life has been defeated many times in its fight against depression.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • 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.

  • The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

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

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

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

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

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

  • All that shimmers on the surface of the world, all that we call interesting, is the fruit of ignorance and inebriation.

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

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

  • To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall?

  • No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

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

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

  • The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

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

  • 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.

  • True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.

  • We change ideas like neckties.

  • There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.

  • Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart's drama and the negative meaning of history.

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

  • 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.

  • Everything is pathology, except for indifference.

  • The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.

  • The only free mind is one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

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

  • Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?

  • 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?

  • One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

  • No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one

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

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

  • Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

  • To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.

  • The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.

  • The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.

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

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

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

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

  • The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.

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

  • We derive our vitality from our store of madness.

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

  • The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion...one would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.

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

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

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

  • Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.

  • Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

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

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

  • Our first intuitions are the true ones.

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

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

  • 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.

  • Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.

  • We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

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

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

  • Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share