Philosopher · Romanian · b. 1911 · 102 quotes
Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.
Emile M. Cioran
Philosopher · Romanian · b. 1911
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
We inhabit a language rather than a country.
What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.
I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.
We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.
To act is to anchor in the imminent future.
Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.
Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.
A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?
I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.
We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
Everything is pathology, except for indifference.
The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
The Universal view melts things into a blur.
Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.
Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.
Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.
Word - that invisible dagger.
Our first intuitions are the true ones.
Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.
Under each formula lies a corpse.
