Emile M. Cioran Quotes - Page 13

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.

In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.

My enthusiasms...constitute my reserves, my unexploited resources, perhaps my future.

To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!

I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.

It has been a long time since philosophers have read men's souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.

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.

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.

Utopia is the grotesque en rose, the need to associate happiness - that is, the improbable - with becoming, and to coerce an optimistic, aerial vision to the point where it rejoins its own source: the very cynicism it sought to combat. In short, a monstrous fantasy.

All great ideas should be followed by an exclamation mark - a warning signal similar to the skull and crossbones drawn on high-voltage transformers.

In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.

Every profound dissatisfaction is of a religious nature: our failures derive from our incapacity to conceive of paradise and to aspire to it, as our discomforts from the fragility of our relations with the absolute.

Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.

the deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life.

Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Word - that invisible dagger.

The reaction against your own thought in itself lends life to thought. How this reaction is born is hard to describe, because it identifies with the very rare intellectual tragedies. The tension, the degree and level of intensity of a thought proceeds from its internal antinomies, which in turn are derived from the unsolvable contradictions of a soul. Thought cannot solve the contradictions of the soul. As far as linear thinking is concerned, thoughts mirror themselves in other thoughts, instead of mirroring a destiny.

What is pity but the vice of kindness.

The amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its profundity.

We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job.

Pursued by our origins... we all are.

Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.