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Emil Cioran
532 quotes
“Society: an inferno of saviors!”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Irons and the unbreathable air of this world strip us of everything, except the freedom to kill ourselves; and this freedom grants us a strength and pride to triumph over the loads which overwhelm us.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a single second we do away with all seconds; God himself could not do as much.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But, braggart demons, we postpone our end: how could we renounce the display of our freedom, the show of our pride?”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle...”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name — and moving on.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life inspires more dread than death — it is life which is the great unknown.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Reality is a creation of our excesses.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The universal view melts things into a blur.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Truths begin by a conflict with the police — and end by calling them in.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At different degrees, everything is pathology, except for indifference.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To Live signifies to believe and hope — to lie and to lie to oneself.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Vague a l'ame — melancholy yearning for the end of the world.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Try to be free: you will die of hunger.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action — mother of all vices — I am the cause of no one's suffering.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“History shows that the thinkers who mounted on the top of the ladder of questions, who set their foot on the last rung, that of the absurd, have bequeathed to posterity only an example of sterility.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“History proves nothing because it contains everything.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing is indefensible — from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To repeat to yourself a thousand times a day: 'Nothing on Earth has any worth,' to keep finding yourself at the same point, to circle stupidly as a top, eternally...”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I dream of wanting — and all I want seems to me worthless.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source