E. M. Cioran Quotes

the deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life.

Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.

All people see fires, storms, explosions, or landscapes; but how many feel the flames, the lightnings, the whirlwinds, or the harmony? How many have an inner beauty that tinges their melancholy?

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission.

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

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing; but instead of nonchalantly promenading our own corruption, we exude our sweat and grow winded upon the fetid air.

A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice.

So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.

I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.

Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.

Between the demand to be clear,and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect.

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

We inhabit a language rather than a country.

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

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.

Try to be free: you will die of hunger.

To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell

The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty-the sideshow of second thoughts-is his rule; he offers himself.

He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.

You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.

Basis of society: anonymous sweat.

We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.

To have committed every crime but that of being a father.

If a man has not, by the time he is thirty, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism—I don't know whether he is to be admired or scorned, regarded as a saint or a corpse.

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

As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.

Every thought should recall the ruin of a smile.

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

An individual dies ... when, instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being, he cowers within, and takes refuge there.

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

One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.

No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.

Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught.

I have always struggled, with the sole intention of ceasing to struggle. Result: zero.

Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.

Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.

Once you see that everything is unreal, you can't see why you should bother to prove it.

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

Discretion is deadly to genius; ruinous to talent.

In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.

Every form of talent involves a certain shameless-ness.

The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.

An existence transfigured by failure.

A book has to dig through the wounds, more, it has cause a new one, a book it has to be dangerous.

We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

I do not want to see BP nickel and diming these businesses that are having a tough time.

If you lack the power to demoralize yourself along with the age, to go as low and as far, do not complain of being misunderstood by it.

"The Holy Ghost," Luther instructs us, "is not a skeptic." Not everyone can be, and that is really too bad.