Top 100 Emile M. Cioran Quotes
#1. 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.
Emile M. Cioran
#2. A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
Emile M. Cioran
#5. 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."
Emile M. Cioran
#6. In most cases we attach ourselves to in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify we can do without it, that we have found something better, and we also attach ourselves to God in horror of men.
Emile M. Cioran
#7. Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.
Emile M. Cioran
#8. Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
Emile M. Cioran
#9. The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.
Emile M. Cioran
#10. The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity ... Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does this whispering voice say? Everything in us that is not human anymore.
Emile M. Cioran
#11. 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.
Emile M. Cioran
#12. Tyrants are always assassinated too late. That is their great excuse.
Emile M. Cioran
#13. If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame.
Emile M. Cioran
#14. Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
Emile M. Cioran
#15. Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent -unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it -we perpetuate it within ourselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude.
Emile M. Cioran
#16. What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.
Emile M. Cioran
#17. To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.
Emile M. Cioran
#18. We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.
Emile M. Cioran
#19. What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.
Emile M. Cioran
#20. 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.
Emile M. Cioran
#21. A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
Emile M. Cioran
#22. No one can keep his griefs in their prime; they use themselves up.
Emile M. Cioran
#23. Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.
Emile M. Cioran
#24. God - a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
Emile M. Cioran
#25. 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.
Emile M. Cioran
#26. The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
Emile M. Cioran
#27. Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
Emile M. Cioran
#28. Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor and revolt, a perplexity on fire.
Emile M. Cioran
#29. 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?
Emile M. Cioran
#30. 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.
Emile M. Cioran
#31. The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. Why call him a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot.
Emile M. Cioran
#32. To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell
Emile M. Cioran
#33. If you're unlucky enough not to have alcoholic parents, it takes you a whole lifetime of intoxication to overcome the dead weight of their virtues.
Emile M. Cioran
#34. The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?
Emile M. Cioran
#35. On Creating - What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures.
Emile M. Cioran
#36. By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?
Emile M. Cioran
#37. A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It's not easy to be on the wrong foot with life
Emile M. Cioran
#38. What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.
Emile M. Cioran
#39. I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.
Emile M. Cioran
#40. For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
Emile M. Cioran
#41. One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.
Emile M. Cioran
#42. Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
Emile M. Cioran
#45. To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall?
Emile M. Cioran
#46. Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
Emile M. Cioran
#48. Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.
Emile M. Cioran
#50. I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.
Emile M. Cioran
#51. Where are my sensations? They have melted into ... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?
Emile M. Cioran
#52. The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.
Emile M. Cioran
#54. Hungarian Language - savage it may be but of a beauty that has nothing human about it, with sonorities of another universe, powerful and corrosive, appropriate to prayer, to groans and to tears, risen out of hell to perpetuate its accent and its aura ... words of nectar and cyanide.
Emile M. Cioran
#56. How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.
Emile M. Cioran
#57. I do not want to see BP nickel and diming these businesses that are having a tough time.
Emile M. Cioran
#58. A book has to dig through the wounds, more, it has cause a new one, a book it has to be dangerous.
Emile M. Cioran
#59. Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.
Emile M. Cioran
#60. Every form of talent involves a certain shameless-ness.
Emile M. Cioran
#61. Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.
Emile M. Cioran
#62. Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.
Emile M. Cioran
#63. We define only out of despair, we must have a formula ... to give a facade tot he void.
Emile M. Cioran
#64. My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.
Emile M. Cioran
#65. Afflicted with existence, each man endures like an animal the consequences which proceed from it. Thus, in a world where everything is detestable, hatred becomes huger than the world and, having transcended its object, cancels itself out.
Emile M. Cioran
#66. Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
Emile M. Cioran
#67. True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.
Emile M. Cioran
#68. Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.
Emile M. Cioran
#69. 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.
Emile M. Cioran
#71. Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
Emile M. Cioran
#72. A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.
Emile M. Cioran
#74. History proves nothing because it contains everything.
Emile M. Cioran
#75. Trees are massacred, houses go up - faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.
Emile M. Cioran
#76. A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
Emile M. Cioran
#77. To live ... in any sense of the word ... is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence.
Emile M. Cioran
#78. I don't understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.
Emile M. Cioran
#79. Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.
Emile M. Cioran
#81. Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.
Emile M. Cioran
#82. No human beings are more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief
Emile M. Cioran
#83. All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.
Emile M. Cioran
#84. Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.
Emile M. Cioran
#85. 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.
Emile M. Cioran
#87. Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
Emile M. Cioran
#88. The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.
Emile M. Cioran
#89. History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.
Emile M. Cioran
#91. Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
Emile M. Cioran
#92. An individual dies ... when, instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being, he cowers within, and takes refuge there.
Emile M. Cioran
#93. Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
Emile M. Cioran
#94. One doesn't live in a country, one lives in a language.
Emile M. Cioran
#95. The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.
Emile M. Cioran
#96. 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.
Emile M. Cioran
#99. In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
Emile M. Cioran
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