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Famous Emile M. Cioran Quotes
“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
“Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.”
“By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.”
“Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.”
“We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.”
“Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.”
“What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?”
“I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.”
“A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.”
“Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.”
“Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.”
“The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.”
“Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.”
“A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.”
“Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.”
“Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.”
“God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.”
“Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.”
“So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.”
“The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.”
“A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.”
“Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.”
“Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.”
“Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.”
“In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.”
“Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.”
“Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.”
“Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.”
“The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.”
“The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.”
“The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.”