Emile M. Cioran Quotes - Page 14

Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.

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.

Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.

That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.

One doesn't live in a country, one lives in a language.

What necessity impels a writer who has produced fifty books to write still one more? Why this proliferation, this fear of being forgotten, this debased coquetry?

The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.

I do not want to see BP nickel and diming these businesses that are having a tough time.

Boredom dismantles the mind, renders it superficial, out at the seams, saps it from within and dislocates it.

Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.

To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.

"The Holy Ghost," Luther instructs us, "is not a skeptic." Not everyone can be, and that is really too bad.

In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.

We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.

A sensation must have fallen very low to deign to turn into an idea.

The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.

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.

The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.

Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.

Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.

Tolerance cannot seduce the young.

Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist-a demonic, elemental, bestial pessimist-only when life has been defeated many times in its fight against depression.

As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.