Emil Cioran Quotes
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The farther men get from God, the farther they advance into the knowledge of religions.
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The mind advances only when it has the patience to go in circles, in other words, to deepen.
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Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.
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The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world.
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Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?
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Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.
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To try curing someone of a 'vice,' of what is the deepest thing he has, is to attack his very being, and this is indeed how he himself understands it, since he will never forgive you for wanting him to destroy himself in your way and not his.
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Tears do not burn except in solitude.
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Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with our kind: the more we practice it, the more we become like everyone else: it is in the performance of a reputedly bestial function that we prove our status as citizens: nothing is more public than the sexual act.
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To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!
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If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.
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Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.
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'You really should come to the house - one of these days we might die without having seen each other again.' - 'Since we have to die in any case, what's the use of seeing each other again?'
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Our first intuitions are the true ones.
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We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
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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.
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All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.
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Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.
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To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.
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The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable.
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It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false.
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A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.
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The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.
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Endless brooding over a question undermines you as much as a dull pain.