Emile M. Cioran Quotes - Page 2

How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.

There was a time when time did not yet exist.

A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.

The Art of Love: knowing how to combine the temperament of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone.

True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.

Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?

Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.

How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history - greater than the fall of empires - I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.

I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?

The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

I am the beast with a contorted grin, contracting down to illusion and dilating toward infinity, both growing and dying, delightfully suspended between hope for nothing and despair of everything, brought up among perfumes and poisons, consumed with love and hatred, killed by lights and shadows. My symbol is death of light and the flame of death. Sparks die in me only to be reborn as thunder and lightning. Darkness itself glows in me.

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone.

What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.

I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.

I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person

It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.

Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.

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."

Our first intuitions are the true ones.