Quotes by Emile Cioran

• To act is to anchor in the imminent future.
• The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.
• The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
• The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.
• The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
• The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.
• The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
• There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
• Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
• To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.
• To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.
• 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.
• Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
• So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.
• Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
• Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
• Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
• Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
• Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
• To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.
• What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.
• Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
• We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.
• Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.
• Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
• Word - that invisible dagger.
• Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
• Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
• When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
• What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
• What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.
• What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
• We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
• We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
• To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
• We inhabit a language rather than a country.
• We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
• We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
• We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.
• We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
• We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
• Under each formula lies a corpse.
• Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.
• Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
• Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
• 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.
• Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
• If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
• I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
• I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.
• I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
• Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?
• For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
• Everything is pathology, except for indifference.
• Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
• If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
• Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.
• Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
• Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
• Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
• Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.
• By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
• Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.
• Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
• A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.
• A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
• A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
• Our first intuitions are the true ones.
• The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
• Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
• No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
• A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
• Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.
• Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
• Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.
• One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.
• One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
• 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.
• My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.
• Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
• Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
• Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.
• A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
• No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
• Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
• In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
• In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
• Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
• Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
• It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.
• Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.
• Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
• Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
• A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
• In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.