E. M. Cioran Quotes

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

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

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

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

When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

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.

Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself - there is no wish I make more often.

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

If you're unlucky enough not to have alcoholic parents, it takes you a whole lifetime of intoxication to overcome the dead weight of their virtues.

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

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

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

Existing is plagiarism.

A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.

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.

Tolerance cannot seduce the young.

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

We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.

Humanity adores only those who cause it to perish.

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

Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.

Under each formula lies a corpse.

No human beings are more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief

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

Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.

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?

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

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

To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.

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

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.

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

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.

If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame.

He who hates himself is not humble.

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

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

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.

My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

To act is to anchor in the imminent future.

A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society

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

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

The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.

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

Consciousness is nature's nightmare.

What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.