Emile M. Cioran Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Emile M. Cioran
Emile M. Cioran Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Emile M. Cioran on Wise Famous Quotes.
Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death!
Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?
Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.
If you're unlucky enough not to have alcoholic parents, it takes you a whole lifetime of intoxication to overcome the dead weight of their virtues.
Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.
That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.
The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.
Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?
The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.
"The Holy Ghost," Luther instructs us, "is not a skeptic." Not everyone can be, and that is really too bad.
History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.
If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: "I want to be praised."
Where are my sensations? They have melted into ... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?
Boredom dismantles the mind, renders it superficial, out at the seams, saps it from within and dislocates it.
To live ... in any sense of the word ... is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence.
My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.
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.
What a pity that 'nothingness' has been devalued by an abuse of it made by philosophers unworthy of it!
Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.
To Foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by the hatred smothered within.
An individual dies ... when, instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being, he cowers within, and takes refuge there.
All philosophers should end their days at Pythia's feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.
All great ideas should be followed by an exclamation mark - a warning signal similar to the skull and crossbones drawn on high-voltage transformers.
If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame.
Trees are massacred, houses go up - faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.
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.