Emile M. Cioran Quotes

Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.

Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.

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?

I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside.

By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.

A sensation must have fallen very low to deign to turn into an idea.

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

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

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

Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves.

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

It has been a long time since philosophers have read men's souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

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.

We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.

Thinking should be like musical meditation. Has any philosopher pursued a thought to its limits the way Bach or Beethoven develop and exhaust a musical theme? Even after having read the most profound thinkers, one still feels the need to begin anew. Only music gives definitive answers.

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

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

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.

Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

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

Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.

An existence transfigured by failure.

All people see fires, storms, explosions, or landscapes; but how many feel the flames, the lightnings, the whirlwinds, or the harmony? How many have an inner beauty that tinges their melancholy?

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.

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

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.

As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.

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

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

Nothing sweeter than to drag oneself along behind events; and nothing more reasonable. But without a strong dose of madness, no initiative, no enterprise, no gesture. Reason: the rust of our vitality. It is the madman in us who forces us to adventure; once he abandons us, we are lost; everything depends on him, even our vegetative life; it is he who invites us, who obliges us to breathe, and it is also he who forces our blood to venture through our veins. Once he withdraws, we are alone indeed! We cannot be normal and alive at the same time.

I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.

When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act." And they do calm down.

I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?

Pursued by our origins... we all are.

Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.

I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.

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

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

Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.

I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.

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

Basis of society: anonymous sweat.

Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.