E. M. Cioran Quotes

There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

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."

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.

Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret.

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

To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

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

Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.

Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.

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.

Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.

Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?

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

There is no limit to suffering.

To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!

Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.

Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise.

Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.

Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.

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

If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.

Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.

What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.

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

The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?

We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.

Man started out on the wrong foot. The misadventure in paradise was the first consequence. The rest had to follow.

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.

Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy.

By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

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

The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.

I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.

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

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

History proves nothing because it contains everything.

The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.

Tears do not burn except in solitude.

All philosophers should end their days at Pythia's feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.

To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.

A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime.

True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.

It has been a long time since philosophers have read men's souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.

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

The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.

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.

Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.

I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.