Emile M. Cioran Quotes - Page 4

When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act." And they do calm down.

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside.

Transmitting one's flaws [through procreation] to someone else is a crime. I could never consent to give life to someone who would inherent my ailments.

The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.

The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable.

To accomplish nothing and die of the strain

There is not much difference between a mortal man and a dying man. The absurdity of making plans is only slightly more obvious in the second case.

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away.

Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?

We are all geniuses when we dream.

Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death!

What music appeals to in us it is difficult to know; what we do know is that music reaches a zone so deep that madness itself cannot penetrate there.

If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.

What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.

Everything is pathology, except for indifference.

No human beings are more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief

True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.

Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.

Normal people have nothing to forget.