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Quotes by Emile M. Cioran

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
– Emile M. Cioran
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
– Emile M. Cioran
The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
– Emile M. Cioran
The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
– Emile M. Cioran
The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.
– Emile M. Cioran
The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.
– Emile M. Cioran
The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.
– Emile M. Cioran
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
– Emile M. Cioran
The Universal view melts things into a blur.
– Emile M. Cioran
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
– Emile M. Cioran
To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.
– Emile M. Cioran
To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer. As soon as they consent to live, the unbeliever and the man of faith are fundamentally the same, since both have made the only decision that defines a being.
– Emile M. Cioran
To Foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by the hatred smothered within.
– Emile M. Cioran
To live is to lose ground.
– Emile M. Cioran
To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.
– Emile M. Cioran
To live... in any sense of the word... is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence.
– Emile M. Cioran
To think is to take a cunning revenge in which we camoflage our baseness and conceal our lower instincts.
– Emile M. Cioran
To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.
– Emile M. Cioran
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
– Emile M. Cioran
Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
– Emile M. Cioran
Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.
– Emile M. Cioran
Truths begin by a conflict with the police- and end by calling them in.
– Emile M. Cioran
Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself.
– Emile M. Cioran
Under each formula lies a corpse.
– Emile M. Cioran
Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.
– Emile M. Cioran
Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world.
– Emile M. Cioran
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
– Emile M. Cioran
We are all secularized anarchist today.
– Emile M. Cioran
We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
– Emile M. Cioran
We change ideas like neckties.
– Emile M. Cioran
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.
– Emile M. Cioran
We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
– Emile M. Cioran
We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
– Emile M. Cioran
We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.
– Emile M. Cioran
We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
– Emile M. Cioran
Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.
– Emile M. Cioran
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
– Emile M. Cioran
What is pity but the vice of kindness.
– Emile M. Cioran
What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.
– Emile M. Cioran
What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name- and moving on.
– Emile M. Cioran
What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures.
– Emile M. Cioran
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
– Emile M. Cioran
When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
– Emile M. Cioran
Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?
– Emile M. Cioran
Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor and revolt, a perplexity on fire.
– Emile M. Cioran
Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
– Emile M. Cioran
Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
– Emile M. Cioran
Word - that invisible dagger.
– Emile M. Cioran
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
– Emile M. Cioran
You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.
– Emile M. Cioran
We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
– Emile M. Cioran
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.
– Emile M. Cioran