Emile M. Cioran Quotes - Page 6

Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

A book is a suicide postponed.

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.

To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel you are consubstantial with that future.

No one can do without some semblance of immortality, and even less will they deny themselves the right to seek it out in the form of this or that reputation, starting with the literary... Since death has come to be accepted by all as the absolute end, everyone writes.

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

To live... in any sense of the word... is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence.

Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?

What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.

There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?

Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.

Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart's drama and the negative meaning of history.

All people see fires, storms, explosions, or landscapes; but how many feel the flames, the lightnings, the whirlwinds, or the harmony? How many have an inner beauty that tinges their melancholy?

Doubt works deep within you like a disease or, even more effectively, like a faith.

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.

The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.

Society: an inferno of saviors!

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.

There is only one thing worse than boredom, and that is the fear of boredom.

Between the demand to be clear,and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect.

I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity.

The only free mind is one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.