Emil M. Cioran Quotes page 9

“Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?”

History and Utopia (1960)

“One hardly saves a world without ruling it.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.”

History and Utopia (1960)

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.”

“We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.”

History and Utopia (1960)

“To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement.”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“Death poses a problem which replaces all the others. What is deadly to philosophy, to the naive belief in the hierarchy of perplexities.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“To conceive a thought — just one, but one that would tear the universe to pieces.”

History and Utopia (1960)

“I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide...”

The New Gods (1969)

“One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

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

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.”

History and Utopia (1960)

“A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.”

History and Utopia (1960)

“Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.”

History and Utopia (1960)

“I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing — between two fictions.”

“Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“Without its assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation?”

History and Utopia (1960)

“The need to devour oneself absolves one of the need to believe.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.”

The Temptation to Exist (1956)

“Try as I will, I don't see what might exist…”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned — a saint or a corpse.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“To try curing someone of a "vice," of what is the deepest thing he has, is to attack his very being, and this is indeed how he himself understands it, since he will never forgive you for wanting him to destroy himself in your way and not his.”

History and Utopia (1960)

“In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future.”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“Saints live in flames; wise men, next to them.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.”

Tears and Saints (1937)

“To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“If I were asked to summarize as briefly as possible my vision of things, to reduce it to its most succinct expression, I should replace words with an exclamation point, a definitive!”

History and Utopia (1960)

“To read is to let someone else work for you — the most delicate form of exploitation.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“The mind advances only when it has the patience to go in circles, in other words, to deepen.”

The New Gods (1969)

“In order to deceive melancholy, you must keep moving. Once you stop, it wakens, if in fact it has ever dozed off.”

The New Gods (1969)

“No longer ask me for my program: isn't breathing one?”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“Nothing surpasses the pleasures of idleness: even if the end of the world were to come, I would not leave my bed at an ungodly hour.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.”

“The initial revelation of any monastery: everything is nothing. Thus begin all mysticisms. It is less than one step from nothing to God, for God is the positive expression of nothingness.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)