“The Universal view melts things into a blur.”
― Emil Cioran
“Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.”
― Emil Cioran
“Everything is pathology, except for indifference.”
― Emil Cioran
“The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.”
― Emil Cioran
“Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.”
― Emil Cioran
“Tolerance – the function of an extinguished ardor – tolerance cannot seduce the young.”
― Emil 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.”
― Emil Cioran
“Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.”
― Emil Cioran
“What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?”
― Emil 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.”
― Emil Cioran
“Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.”
― Emil Cioran
“A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.”
― Emil Cioran
“What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name – and moving on.”
― Emil Cioran
“Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.”
― Emil Cioran
“My mission is to kill time, and time’s to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.”
― Emil Cioran
“Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.”
― Emil Cioran
“Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.”
― Emil Cioran
“Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.”
― Emil Cioran
“We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.”
― Emil Cioran
“For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.”
― Emil Cioran
“In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.”
― Emil Cioran
“Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.”
― Emil Cioran
“No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.”
― Emil Cioran
“Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.”
― Emil Cioran
“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
― Emil Cioran
“Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.”
― Emil Cioran
“Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher’s the poet’s equal there.”
― Emil Cioran
“Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.”
― Emil 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.”
― Emil Cioran
“Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.”
― Emil Cioran
“We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.”
― Emil Cioran
“To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.”
― Emil Cioran
“Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.”
― Emil Cioran
“The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live – moreover, the only one.”
― Emil Cioran
“We derive our vitality from our store of madness.”
― Emil Cioran
“If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.”
― Emil Cioran
“A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.”
― Emil Cioran
“Word – that invisible dagger.”
― Emil Cioran
“Under each formula lies a corpse.”
― Emil Cioran
“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.”
― Emil 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.”
― Emil Cioran
“However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.”
― Emil Cioran
“The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.”
― Emil Cioran
“What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you – what a revelation.”
― Emil Cioran
“What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?”
― Emil Cioran
“I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.”
― Emil Cioran
“A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.”
― Emil Cioran
“Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven’t been cut off.”
― Emil Cioran
“Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.”
― Emil Cioran
“Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.”
― Emil Cioran
“There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.”
― Emil Cioran
“The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.”
― Emil Cioran
“Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.”
― Emil Cioran
“A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.”
― Emil Cioran
“Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.”
― Emil Cioran
“Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.”
― Emil Cioran
“The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.”
― Emil Cioran
“In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.”
― Emil Cioran
“Life inspires more dread than death – it is life which is the great unknown.”
― Emil Cioran
“Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.”
― Emil Cioran
“We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.”
― Emil Cioran
“Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.”
― Emil Cioran
“Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.”
― Emil Cioran
“By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.”
― Emil Cioran
“Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.”
― Emil Cioran
“We define only out of despair, we must have a formula… to give a facade tot he void.”
― Emil Cioran
“Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.”
― Emil Cioran
“We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.”
― Emil Cioran
“So long as man is protected by madness – he functions – and flourishes.”
― Emil Cioran
“Truths begin by a conflict with the police – and end by calling them in.”
― Emil Cioran
“Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.”
― Emil Cioran
“To Live signifies to believe and hope – to lie and to lie to oneself.”
― Emil Cioran
“We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.”
― Emil Cioran
“It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.”
― Emil Cioran
“When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.”
― Emil Cioran
“Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.”
― Emil Cioran
“Glory – once achieved, what is it worth?”
― Emil Cioran
“No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.”
― Emil Cioran
“Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.”
― Emil Cioran
“A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation’s paradise and its tomb.”
― Emil Cioran
“One hardly saves a world without ruling it.”
― Emil Cioran
“Jealousy – that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.”
― Emil Cioran
“I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.”
― Emil Cioran
“Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.”
― Emil Cioran
“Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.”
― Emil Cioran
“We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.”
― Emil Cioran
“To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.”
― Emil Cioran
“Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.”
― Emil Cioran
“If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.”
― Emil Cioran
“In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.”
― Emil Cioran
“The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.”
― Emil Cioran
“Isn’t history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?”
― Emil Cioran
“We inhabit a language rather than a country.”
― Emil Cioran
“I’m simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?”
― Emil Cioran
“I have no nationality – the best possible status for an intellectual.”
― Emil Cioran
“The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.”
― Emil Cioran
“Our first intuitions are the true ones.”
― Emil Cioran
“The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.”
― Emil Cioran
“One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland – and no other.”
― Emil Cioran
“God – a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.”
― Emil Cioran
“Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.”
― Emil 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.”
― Emil 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.”
― Emil 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.”
― Emil Cioran
“To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.”
― Emil Cioran
“Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.”
― Emil Cioran
“I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.”
― Emil Cioran
“One should live and die where one was born… I’ve been bored everywhere I went. What was the point of leaving Coasta Boacu?”
― Emil Cioran
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