E. M. Cioran Quotes
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.
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.
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.
A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.
If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.
When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.
Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?
For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity.
Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.
Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.
To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel you are consubstantial with that future.
Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.
It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: in truth, it is itself the quintessence of injustice.
Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.
A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
Boredom dismantles the mind, renders it superficial, out at the seams, saps it from within and dislocates it.
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.
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?
To live entirely without a goal! I have glimpsed this state, and have often attained it, without managing to remain there: I am too weak for such happiness.
True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.
As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.
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.