Emile M. Cioran Quotes

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

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.

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

Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.

A book has to dig through the wounds, more, it has cause a new one, a book it has to be dangerous.

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

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

Afflicted with existence, each man endures like an animal the consequences which proceed from it. Thus, in a world where everything is detestable, hatred becomes huger than the world and, having transcended its object, cancels itself out.

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

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

One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.

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

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

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

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.

I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen--and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies.

I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.

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

One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.

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

We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.

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

How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.

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

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.

Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy!

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

There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.

To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.

If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame.

There was a time when time did not yet exist.

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.

Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

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

We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

We are all geniuses when we dream.

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.

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

History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.

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.

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.

The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.

As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.

Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?