One hardly saves a world without ruling it.


Emile M. Cioran

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Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.
THOMAS KENEALLY
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's eq...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Everything is pathology, except for indifference.
EMILE M. CIORAN
The Universal view melts things into a blur.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal ther...
EMILE M. CIORAN
The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for on...
EMILE M. CIORAN
A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
EMILE M. CIORAN
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose atte...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Our first intuitions are the true ones.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Word - that invisible dagger.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
EMILE M. CIORAN
The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
EMILE M. CIORAN
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately consci...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
EMILE M. CIORAN
My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderer...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor ...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
EMILE M. CIORAN
We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
EMILE M. CIORAN
A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
EMILE M. CIORAN
The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for on...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
EMILE M. CIORAN
So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not fi...
EMILE M. CIORAN
The "west" - what curse has fallen upon it that at the term of its trajectory it produces only these...
EMILE M. CIORAN
The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
EMILE M. CIORAN
If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
EMILE M. CIORAN
To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
EMILE M. CIORAN
A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
EMILE M. CIORAN
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
EMILE M. CIORAN
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
EMILE M. CIORAN
Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the ...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a...
EMILE M. CIORAN
I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
EMILE M. CIORAN
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
EMILE M. CIORAN
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
EMILE M. CIORAN
To be modern is to tinker with the incurable.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and inven...
EMILE M. CIORAN
The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to ot...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Our contortions, visible or secret, we communicate to the planet; already it trembles even as we do,...
EMILE M. CIORAN
To live... in any sense of the word... is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do on...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massac...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Maniacs of Procreation, bipeds with devalued faces, we have lost all appeal for each other.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.
EMILE M. CIORAN
It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
EMILE M. CIORAN
The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.
EMILE M. CIORAN
You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: i...
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
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and n...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ru...
EMILE M. CIORAN
In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Man is unacceptable.
EMILE M. CIORAN
I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged in...
EMILE M. CIORAN
In most cases we attach ourselves to God in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify ...
EMILE M. CIORAN
If our fellow men could be aware of our opinions about them, love, friendship, and devotion would be...
EMILE M. CIORAN
We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
EMILE M. CIORAN
It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.
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 inhabit a language rather than a country.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you...
EMILE M. CIORAN
We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
EMILE M. CIORAN
A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more effic...
EMILE M. CIORAN
No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
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
The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
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
For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
EMILE M. CIORAN
The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
EMILE M. CIORAN
A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
EMILE M. CIORAN
The beauty of flames lies in their strange play, beyond all proportion and harmony. Their diaphanous...
EMILE M. CIORAN
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
EMILE M. CIORAN
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so...
EMILE M. CIORAN
When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Not to be obliged, like so many others, to choose between the insipid and the atrocious.
EMILE M. CIORAN
To Foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by t...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Pursued by our origins... we all are.
EMILE M. CIORAN
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untain...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Under each formula lies a corpse.
EMILE M. CIORAN
You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: i...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
EMILE M. CIORAN
I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.
EMILE M. CIORAN
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
EMILE M. CIORAN

More Emile M. Cioran

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's eq...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Everything is pathology, except for indifference.
EMILE M. CIORAN
The Universal view melts things into a blur.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal ther...
EMILE M. CIORAN
The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for on...
EMILE M. CIORAN
A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
EMILE M. CIORAN
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose atte...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Our first intuitions are the true ones.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Word - that invisible dagger.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
EMILE M. CIORAN
The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
EMILE M. CIORAN
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately consci...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
EMILE M. CIORAN
My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderer...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor ...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
EMILE M. CIORAN
We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
EMILE M. CIORAN
A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
EMILE M. CIORAN
The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for on...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
EMILE M. CIORAN
So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not fi...
EMILE M. CIORAN
The "west" - what curse has fallen upon it that at the term of its trajectory it produces only these...
EMILE M. CIORAN
The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
EMILE M. CIORAN
If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
EMILE M. CIORAN
To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
EMILE M. CIORAN
A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
EMILE M. CIORAN
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
EMILE M. CIORAN
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
EMILE M. CIORAN
Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the ...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a...
EMILE M. CIORAN
I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
EMILE M. CIORAN
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
EMILE M. CIORAN
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
EMILE M. CIORAN
To be modern is to tinker with the incurable.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and inven...
EMILE M. CIORAN
The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to ot...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Our contortions, visible or secret, we communicate to the planet; already it trembles even as we do,...
EMILE M. CIORAN
To live... in any sense of the word... is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do on...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massac...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Maniacs of Procreation, bipeds with devalued faces, we have lost all appeal for each other.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.
EMILE M. CIORAN
It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
EMILE M. CIORAN
The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.
EMILE M. CIORAN
You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: i...
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
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and n...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ru...
EMILE M. CIORAN
In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Man is unacceptable.
EMILE M. CIORAN
I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged in...
EMILE M. CIORAN
In most cases we attach ourselves to God in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify ...
EMILE M. CIORAN
If our fellow men could be aware of our opinions about them, love, friendship, and devotion would be...
EMILE M. CIORAN
We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
EMILE M. CIORAN
It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.
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 inhabit a language rather than a country.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you...
EMILE M. CIORAN
We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
EMILE M. CIORAN
A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more effic...
EMILE M. CIORAN
No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
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
The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
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
For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
EMILE M. CIORAN
The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
EMILE M. CIORAN
A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
EMILE M. CIORAN
The beauty of flames lies in their strange play, beyond all proportion and harmony. Their diaphanous...
EMILE M. CIORAN
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
EMILE M. CIORAN
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so...
EMILE M. CIORAN
When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Not to be obliged, like so many others, to choose between the insipid and the atrocious.
EMILE M. CIORAN
To Foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by t...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Pursued by our origins... we all are.
EMILE M. CIORAN
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untain...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Under each formula lies a corpse.
EMILE M. CIORAN
You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: i...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
EMILE M. CIORAN
I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.
EMILE M. CIORAN
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, prec...
EMILE M. CIORAN
Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Basis of society: anonymous sweat.
EMILE M. CIORAN
What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
EMILE M. CIORAN
I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
EMILE M. CIORAN
My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murd...
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
Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
EMILE M. CIORAN
Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
E. M. CIORAN
The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
E. M. CIORAN
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
E. M. CIORAN
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland --and n...
E. M. CIORAN
Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people...
E. M. CIORAN
A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its se...
E. M. CIORAN
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal ther...
E. M. CIORAN
Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
E. M. CIORAN
A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals h...
E. M. CIORAN
Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations ...
E. M. CIORAN
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
E. M. CIORAN
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
E. M. CIORAN
Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untain...
E. M. CIORAN
A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
E. M. CIORAN
God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
E. M. CIORAN
Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent --unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaus...
E. M. CIORAN
What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striv...
E. M. CIORAN
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
E. M. CIORAN
When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances,...
E. M. CIORAN
It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
E. M. CIORAN
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose atte...
E. M. CIORAN
Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not fi...
E. M. CIORAN
Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ours...
E. M. CIORAN
Those who believe in their truth -- the only ones whose imprint is retained by the memory of men -- ...
E. M. CIORAN
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
E. M. CIORAN
Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
E. M. CIORAN
Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist --a demo...
E. M. CIORAN
Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.
E. M. CIORAN
No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are ...
E. M. CIORAN
We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
E. M. CIORAN
The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, th...
E. M. CIORAN
Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than...
E. M. CIORAN
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.
E. M. CIORAN
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
E. M. CIORAN
To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.
E. M. CIORAN
No one can keep his grieves in their prime; they use themselves up.
E. M. CIORAN
The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for on...
E. M. CIORAN
Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.
E. M. CIORAN
We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone wo...
E. M. CIORAN
Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.
E. M. CIORAN
Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with o...
E. M. CIORAN
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal the...
E. M. CIORAN
The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for on...
E. M. CIORAN
Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encount...
E. M. CIORAN
We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficienc...
EMIL M. CIORAN
I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I ...
EMIL M. CIORAN
It has been a long time since philosophers have read men’s souls. It is not their task, we are tol...
EMIL M. CIORAN
We must learn how to explode! Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage.
EMIL M. CIORAN
Magnificat de Bach. Remué jusqu'aux larmes. Il est impossible que ce qui s'y exprime n'ait q...
EMIL M. CIORAN
As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.
EMIL M. CIORAN
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal ther...
E. M. CIORAN
It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
EMIL M. CIORAN
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
E. M. CIORAN
Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.
EMIL M. CIORAN
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
E. M. CIORAN
To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer. As s...
E. M. CIORAN
Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, prec...
EMIL M. CIORAN
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
EMIL M. CIORAN
Our only choice is between irrespirable truths and salutary frauds.
EMIL M. CIORAN
The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.
EMIL M. CIORAN
Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first momen...
EMIL M. CIORAN
Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.
EMIL M. CIORAN
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.
EMIL M. CIORAN
Tristetea, ca si suferinta, ne revela existenta, deoarece în ele avem în constiinta separatia noas...
EMIL M. CIORAN
If you try to convert someone, it will never be to
effect his salvation but to make him suffer ...
EMIL M. CIORAN
We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.
EMIL M. CIORAN
It is no sign of benediction to have been obsessed with the lives of saints, for it is an obsession ...
EMIL M. CIORAN
I have no ideas, only obsessions. Anybody can have ideas. Ideas have never caused anybody's downfall...
EMIL M. CIORAN
Word — That invisible dagger.
EMIL M. CIORAN
My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out. I a...
EMIL M. CIORAN
Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference an...
EMIL M. CIORAN
Les mystiques et leurs «  œuvres  complètes ». Quand on s'adresse à Dieu, et à Dieu seul, co...
EMIL M. CIORAN
A book is a suicide postponed.
EMIL M. CIORAN
True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire w...
EMIL M. CIORAN
Dans les époques de stérilité, on devrait hiberner, dormir jour et nuit pour conserver ses forces...
EMIL M. CIORAN
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
EMIL M. CIORAN
By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from...
EMIL M. CIORAN
Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow me...
EMIL M. CIORAN
Niciodată nu te voi trăda de tot, deşi te-am trădat şi te voi trăda la fiecare pas; Când te-a...
EMIL M. CIORAN
Sînt unii oameni atît de prosti, ca de le-ar aparea vreo idee la suprafata creierului ea s-ar sinu...
EMIL M. CIORAN
In numele si sub teroarea ei (plictiselii, n.m.) parasesc oamenii caminul si moartea agreabila legat...
EMIL M. CIORAN
S'il n'avait gardé une dernière illusion, je me réclamerais volontiers d'Omar Khayyam, de ses tri...
EMIL M. CIORAN
To live entirely without a goal! I have glimpsed this state, and have often attained it, without man...
EMIL M. CIORAN
Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, havin...
EMIL M. CIORAN
Só é saudável em nós aquilo pelo que não somos especificamente nós mesmos: são nossas aversõ...
EMIL M. CIORAN
Of all that was attempted this side of nothingness, is anything more pathetic than this world, excep...
EMIL M. CIORAN
My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out ... ...
EMIL M. CIORAN
If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing it. EMIL M. CIORAN Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist—a demo...
EMIL M. CIORAN
Eu nu am idei ci obsesii. Idei poate avea oricine. Nimeni nu s-a prăbușit din cauza ideilor.
EMIL M. CIORAN
أشعر أنني منفصل تماما عن كل البلدان وعن كل المجموعات. أ�...
EMIL M. CIORAN
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live-moreover, the only one.
EMIL M. CIORAN