E. M. Cioran Quotes
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor and revolt, a perplexity on fire.
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.
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.
A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It’s not easy to be on the wrong foot with life.
The only free mind is one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.
I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away.
Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves.
Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy!
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.
A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.
The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.
Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.
What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.
By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?
I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.
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.
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
