Emile M. Cioran Quotes

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.

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.

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.