Emile M. Cioran Quotes

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.

Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world.

The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.

My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

To act is to anchor in the imminent future.

I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside.

Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.

A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society

Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.

Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.

Consciousness is nature's nightmare.

What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.

He who hates himself is not humble.

If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame.

When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.

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

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?

Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.

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

No human beings are more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief

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

Humanity adores only those who cause it to perish.

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.

Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.

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

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.

Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.

The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.

We cannot be normal and alive at the same time.

My enthusiasms...constitute my reserves, my unexploited resources, perhaps my future.

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.

I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.

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.

Under each formula lies a corpse.

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique - and insignificant.

The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.

Man is a robot with defects.

Society: an inferno of saviors!

What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?

I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.

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

I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.

A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.