Emile M. Cioran Quotes - Page 10

I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen--and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies.

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

A book has to dig through the wounds, more, it has cause a new one, a book it has to be dangerous.

Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.

Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?

So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.

Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?

History proves nothing because it contains everything.

Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission.

By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.

Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.

Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.

To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose dying: Everything!

To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.

Every form of talent involves a certain shameless-ness.