Emil M. Cioran: Trending quotes (page 6)

“You have dreamed of setting the world ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light up a single one!”

“"I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside." This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works on introspection.”

“It is unjust to call imaginary the diseases which are, on the contrary, only too real, since they proceed from our mind, the only regulator of our equilibrium and our health.”

“This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.”

“Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.”

“Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.”

“However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; — unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them. The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.”

“Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.”

“Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.”

“Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.”

“The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live — moreover, the only one.”

“Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.”

“Only those moments count when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than to exchange a word with someone.”

“Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.”

“If we could truly see ourselves the way others see us we'd disappear on the spot.”

“The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.”

“Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.”

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

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