Emile M. Cioran Quotes

To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life.

To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.

A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It’s not easy to be on the wrong foot with life.

The only free mind is one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.

I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away.

Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy!

A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.

Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves.

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

Everything is pathology, except for indifference.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

There was a time when time did not yet exist.

If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.

Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.

To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

We are all geniuses when we dream.

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?

Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?

I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.

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.

Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.

No one can keep his griefs in their prime; they use themselves up.

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

We derive our vitality from our store of madness.

I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.

By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?

Tyrants are always assassinated too late. That is their great excuse.

Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.