Emil M. Cioran Quotes

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“Late at night. I feel like falling into a frenzy, doing some unprecedented thing to release myself, but I don't see against whom, against what…”

“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.”

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

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

“One hardly saves a world without ruling it.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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!”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.”