Words matter. These are the best Emil Cioran Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
To Live signifies to believe and hope – to lie and to lie to oneself.
A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
Word – that invisible dagger.
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.
Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
So long as man is protected by madness – he functions – and flourishes.
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live – moreover, the only one.
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
Our first intuitions are the true ones.
Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.
If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
Jealousy – that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.
Our first intuitions are the true ones.
It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
Glory – once achieved, what is it worth?
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
To Live signifies to believe and hope – to lie and to lie to oneself.
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.
A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
Truths begin by a conflict with the police – and end by calling them in.
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.
We inhabit a language rather than a country.
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.
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland – and no other.
We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.
One should live and die where one was born… I’ve been bored everywhere I went. What was the point of leaving Coasta Boacu?
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.
A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
Under each formula lies a corpse.
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
Isn’t history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.
We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name – and moving on.
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
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.
Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
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.
Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
Isn’t history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
Tolerance – the function of an extinguished ardor – tolerance cannot seduce the young.
The Universal view melts things into a blur.
What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you – what a revelation.
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation’s paradise and its tomb.
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.
I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.
My mission is to kill time, and time’s to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula… to give a facade tot he void.
A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
I have no nationality – the best possible status for an intellectual.
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland – and no other.
We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
I have no nationality – the best possible status for an intellectual.
Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven’t been cut off.
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
Truths begin by a conflict with the police – and end by calling them in.
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.
The Universal view melts things into a blur.
Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
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.
Life inspires more dread than death – it is life which is the great unknown.
