Emile M. Cioran Quotes - Page 3

Try to be free: you will die of hunger.

A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.

When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.

Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.

Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.

He who hates himself is not humble.

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique - and insignificant.

How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.

Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret.

The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?

Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.

Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.

Consciousness is nature's nightmare.

As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.

Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.

Existing is plagiarism.

We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.

I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.

It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false

A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society

I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.