Emile M. Cioran Quotes
If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.
When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.
Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?
For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity.
Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.
Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.
To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel you are consubstantial with that future.
Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.
It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: in truth, it is itself the quintessence of injustice.
Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.
A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
Boredom dismantles the mind, renders it superficial, out at the seams, saps it from within and dislocates it.
The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion... One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.
What necessity impels a writer who has produced fifty books to write still one more? Why this proliferation, this fear of being forgotten, this debased coquetry?
As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.
There is not much difference between a mortal man and a dying man. The absurdity of making plans is only slightly more obvious in the second case.
There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.
If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: "I want to be praised."
What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.
To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.
We must learn how to explode! Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage.
Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.
Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.
What music appeals to in us it is difficult to know; what we do know is that music reaches a zone so deep that madness itself cannot penetrate there.
Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.
Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.
