Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.
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Nothing sweeter than to drag oneself along behind events; and nothing more reasonable. But without a strong dose of madness, no initiative, no enterprise, no gesture. Reason: the rust of our vitality. It is the madman in us who forces us to adventure; once he abandons us, we are lost; everything depends on him, even our vegetative life; it is he who invites us, who obliges us to breathe, and it is also he who forces our blood to venture through our veins. Once he withdraws, we are alone indeed! We cannot be normal and alive at the same time.
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We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
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After having struggled madly to solve all problems, after having suffered on the heights of despair, in the supreme hour of revelation, you will find that the only answer, the only reality, is silence.
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To live... in any sense of the word... is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence.
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The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.
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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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A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society.
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Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
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What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
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I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.
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We are all geniuses when we dream.
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The curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing now but mask and ghost.