Emile M. Cioran Quotes

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.

Tolerance cannot seduce the young.

There is no limit to suffering.

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

I try--without success--to stop finding reasons for vanity in anything. When I happen to manage it nonetheless, I feel that I no longer belong to the mortal gang. I am above everything then, above the gods themselves. Perhaps that is what death is: a sensation of great, of extreme superiority.

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

Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.

A book is a suicide postponed.

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.

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

Tyrants are always assassinated too late. That is their great excuse.

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.

Utopia is the grotesque en rose, the need to associate happiness - that is, the improbable - with becoming, and to coerce an optimistic, aerial vision to the point where it rejoins its own source: the very cynicism it sought to combat. In short, a monstrous fantasy.

Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.

Every profound dissatisfaction is of a religious nature: our failures derive from our incapacity to conceive of paradise and to aspire to it, as our discomforts from the fragility of our relations with the absolute.

Every thought should recall the ruin of a smile.

We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone 'happy', no greater flattery than to grant him a 'vein of melancholy'... This is because gaiety is link to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.

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

We cannot be normal and alive at the same time.

Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with our kind: the more we practice it, the more we become like everyone else: it is in the performance of a reputedly bestial function that we prove our status as citizens: nothing is more public than the sexual act.

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

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

Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.

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

There is not much difference between a mortal man and a dying man. The absurdity of making plans is only slightly more obvious in the second case.

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

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing; but instead of nonchalantly promenading our own corruption, we exude our sweat and grow winded upon the fetid air.

Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.

The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?

Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world.

I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.

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

To hope is to contradict the future.

What strangely enchanted tunes gush forth during those sleepless nights!

At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.

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

Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.

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

If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.

Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.

I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.

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

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

Between the demand to be clear,and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect.

To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.

To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!

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