Emil Cioran Quotes
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Born in a prison, with burdens on our shoulders and our thoughts, we could not reach the end of a single day if the possibilities of ending it all did not incite us to begin the next day all over again.
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I long to be free-desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.
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In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
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The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?
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Who does not believe in Fate proves that he has not lived.
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To think is to run after insecurity, to be demoralized for grandiose trifles, to immure oneself in abstractions with a martyr's avidity, to hunt up complications the way others pursue collapse or gain. The thinker is by definition keen for torment.
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A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
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To have grazed every form of failure, including success.
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Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
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There is no false sensation.
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Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.
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Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.
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Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.
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I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.
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I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.
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Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
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Hope is the normal form of delirium.
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To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion.
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We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
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His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.
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He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.
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We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false.
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If I were asked to summarize as briefly as possible my vision of things, to reduce it to its most succinct expression, I should replace words with an exclamation point, a definitive !
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In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.