Emile M. Cioran's Quotes

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

We inhabit a language rather than a country.

We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.

Word - that invisible dagger.

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.

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

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

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

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.

Everything is pathology, except for indifference.

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

Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?

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

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.

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

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

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

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.

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.

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

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

The Universal view melts things into a blur.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Under each formula lies a corpse.

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

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

We derive our vitality from our store of madness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

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

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

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

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

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