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Quotes by Emile M. Cioran

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
– Emile M. Cioran
A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
– Emile M. Cioran
A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
– Emile M. Cioran
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.
– Emile M. Cioran
A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and it's tomb.
– Emile M. Cioran
A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
– Emile M. Cioran
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.
– Emile M. Cioran
Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
– Emile M. Cioran
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
– Emile M. Cioran
Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.
– Emile M. Cioran
Balkans - that taste for devastation, for internal clutter, for a universe like a brothel on fire the last primitives in Europe.
– Emile M. Cioran
Basis of society: anonymous sweat.
– Emile M. Cioran
Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.
– Emile M. Cioran
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
– Emile M. Cioran
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.
– Emile M. Cioran
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
– Emile M. Cioran
Consciousness is nature's nightmare.
– Emile M. Cioran
Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
– Emile M. Cioran
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
– Emile M. Cioran
Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.
– Emile M. Cioran
Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.
– Emile M. Cioran
Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.
– Emile M. Cioran
Each time you find yourself at a turning point, the best thing is to lie down and let hours pass. Resolutions made standing up are worthless: they are dictated either by pride or by fear. Prone, we still know these two scourges, but in a more attenuated, more intemporal form.
– Emile M. Cioran
Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
– Emile M. Cioran
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
– Emile M. Cioran
Everything is pathology, except for indifference.
– Emile M. Cioran
For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
– Emile M. Cioran
Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.
– Emile M. Cioran
Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?
– Emile M. Cioran
Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.
– Emile M. Cioran
I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul.
– Emile M. Cioran
I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
– Emile M. Cioran
I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.
– Emile M. Cioran
I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.
– Emile M. Cioran
I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations. I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.
– Emile M. Cioran
I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.
– Emile M. Cioran
I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
– Emile M. Cioran
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.
– Emile M. Cioran
If our fellow men could be aware of our opinions about them, love, friendship, and devotion would be forever erased from the dictionaries; and if we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame.
– Emile M. Cioran
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
– Emile M. Cioran
If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
– Emile M. Cioran
Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.
– Emile M. Cioran
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.
– Emile M. Cioran
In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
– Emile M. Cioran
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
– Emile M. Cioran
In most cases we attach ourselves to God in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify we can do without it, that we have found something better, and we also attach ourselves to God in horror of men.
– Emile M. Cioran
In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
– Emile M. Cioran
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
– Emile M. Cioran
Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
– Emile M. Cioran
It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: In truth it is itself the quintessence of injustice.
– Emile M. Cioran
It is because of speech that men give the illusion of being free. By speaking, they deceive themselves, as they deceive others: because they say what they are going to do, who could suspect they are not masters of their actions?
– Emile M. Cioran
It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.
– Emile M. Cioran
It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
– Emile M. Cioran
Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.
– Emile M. Cioran
Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.
– Emile M. Cioran
Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
– Emile M. Cioran
Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
– Emile M. Cioran
Life inspires more dread than death-it is life which is the great unknown.
– Emile M. Cioran
Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.
– Emile M. Cioran
Life is nothing; death, everything. Yet there is nothing which is death, independent of life. It is precisely this absence of autonomous, distinct reality which makes death universal; it has no realm of its own, it is omnipresent, like everything which lacks identity, limit, and bearing: an indecent infinitude.
– Emile M. Cioran
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
– Emile M. Cioran
Man is unacceptable.
– Emile M. Cioran
Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.
– Emile M. Cioran
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
– Emile M. Cioran
Maniacs of Procreation, bipeds with devalued faces, we have lost all appeal for each other.
– Emile M. Cioran
Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
– Emile M. Cioran
Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
– Emile M. Cioran
Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.
– Emile M. Cioran
Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself - there is no wish I make more often .
– Emile M. Cioran
No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.
– Emile M. Cioran
No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
– Emile M. Cioran
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
– Emile M. Cioran
Not to be obliged, like so many others, to choose between the insipid and the atrocious.
– Emile M. Cioran
Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.
– Emile M. Cioran
Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
– Emile M. Cioran
Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil. It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.
– Emile M. Cioran
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.
– Emile M. Cioran
One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
– Emile M. Cioran
Our contortions, visible or secret, we communicate to the planet; already it trembles even as we do, it suffers the contagion of our crises and, as this grand mal spreads, it vomits us forth, cursing us the while.
– Emile M. Cioran
Our first intuitions are the true ones.
– Emile M. Cioran
Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.
– Emile M. Cioran
Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.
– Emile M. Cioran
Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
– Emile M. Cioran
Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety ; refuge among anemic ideas.
– Emile M. Cioran
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
– Emile M. Cioran
Pursued by our origins... we all are.
– Emile M. Cioran
Reality is a creation of our excesses.
– Emile M. Cioran
Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.
– Emile M. Cioran
Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
– Emile M. Cioran
Russia - immensity and suffocation.
– Emile M. Cioran
Saints live in flames, wisemen, next to them.
– Emile M. Cioran
Schisms and heresies are nationalisms in disguise.
– Emile M. Cioran
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
– Emile M. Cioran
So long as man is protected by madness-he functions-and flourishes.
– Emile M. Cioran
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
– Emile M. Cioran
Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
– Emile M. Cioran
Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.
– Emile M. Cioran
That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.
– Emile M. Cioran
The west - what curse has fallen upon it that at the term of its trajectory it produces only these businessmen, these shopkeepers, these racketeers with their blank stares and atrophied smiles... is it with such vermin as this that a civilization so delicate and so complex must come to an end?
– Emile M. Cioran
The curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing now but mask & ghost.
– Emile M. Cioran