Emile M. Cioran Quotes

I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.

An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.

Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.

I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.

We change ideas like neckties.

No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity; – for thoughts, there is always time; life has its time; there is no thought that comes too late; any desire can become a regret.

I am the beast with a contorted grin, contracting down to illusion and dilating toward infinity, both growing and dying, delightfully suspended between hope for nothing and despair of everything, brought up among perfumes and poisons, consumed with love and hatred, killed by lights and shadows. My symbol is death of light and the flame of death. Sparks die in me only to be reborn as thunder and lightning. Darkness itself glows in me.

What is pity but the vice of kindness.

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

Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.

We derive our vitality from our store of madness.

My enthusiasms...constitute my reserves, my unexploited resources, perhaps my future.

Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.

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?

The universal view melts things into a blur.

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.

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

Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.

The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity… Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does this whispering voice say? Everything in us that is not human anymore.

Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.

We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.

Discretion is deadly to genius; ruinous to talent.

A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.

Everything is pathology, except for indifference.

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.

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

We must learn how to explode! Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage.

Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught.

Transmitting one's flaws [through procreation] to someone else is a crime. I could never consent to give life to someone who would inherent my ailments.

If a man has not, by the time he is thirty, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism—I don't know whether he is to be admired or scorned, regarded as a saint or a corpse.

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

Maniacs of Procreation, bipeds with devalued faces, we have lost all appeal for each other.

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

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

That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.

Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.

To think is to take a cunning revenge in which we camouflage our baseness and conceal our lower instincts.

What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?

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

Hungarian Language — savage it may be but of a beauty that has nothing human about it, with sonorities of another universe, powerful and corrosive, appropriate to prayer, to groans and to tears, risen out of hell to perpetuate its accent and its aura…words of nectar and cyanide.

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

We inhabit a language rather than a country.

This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique - and insignificant.

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

To act is to anchor in the imminent future.

What a pity that 'nothingness' has been devalued by an abuse of it made by philosophers unworthy of it!

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

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