Emile M. Cioran Quotes

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

What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself.

All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.

The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.

Boredom dismantles the mind, renders it superficial, out at the seams, saps it from within and dislocates it.

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

Humanity adores only those who cause it to perish.

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.

If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: "I want to be praised."

Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone.

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.

One doesn't live in a country, one lives in a language.

To Foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by the hatred smothered within.

My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say “we" with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke "others" and regard himself as their interpreter - for me to consider him my enemy.

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

Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?

If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.

Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.

The Art of Love: knowing how to combine the temperament of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone.

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose dying: Everything!

To live in any true sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must be able to renounce, to do oneself violence, to act against one's own nature, to weaken oneself; we conceive freedom only for ourselves - we extend it to our neighbours only at the cost of exhausting efforts; whence the precariousness of liberalism, a defiance of our instincts, a brief and miraculous success, a state of exception, at the antipodes of our deepest imperatives.

What music appeals to in us it is difficult to know; what we do know is that music reaches a zone so deep that madness itself cannot penetrate there.

Doubt works deep within you like a disease or, even more effectively, like a faith.

Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.

There is only one thing worse than boredom, and that is the fear of boredom.

Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death!

We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.

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

Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?

The only free mind is one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

All that shimmers on the surface of the world, all that we call interesting, is the fruit of ignorance and inebriation.

On Creating — What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures.

History proves nothing because it contains everything.

No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.

The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.

Under each formula lies a corpse.

Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist-a demonic, elemental, bestial pessimist-only when life has been defeated many times in its fight against depression.

The reaction against your own thought in itself lends life to thought. How this reaction is born is hard to describe, because it identifies with the very rare intellectual tragedies. The tension, the degree and level of intensity of a thought proceeds from its internal antinomies, which in turn are derived from the unsolvable contradictions of a soul. Thought cannot solve the contradictions of the soul. As far as linear thinking is concerned, thoughts mirror themselves in other thoughts, instead of mirroring a destiny.

Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.

What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.

God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.

Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.

What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.

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

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

Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.