Emile M. Cioran Quotes - Page 7

Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.

If you're unlucky enough not to have alcoholic parents, it takes you a whole lifetime of intoxication to overcome the dead weight of their virtues.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing; but instead of nonchalantly promenading our own corruption, we exude our sweat and grow winded upon the fetid air.

The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.

You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.

Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor and revolt, a perplexity on fire.

We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone 'happy', no greater flattery than to grant him a 'vein of melancholy'... This is because gaiety is link to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.

By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?

Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves.

If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame.

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

The universal view melts things into a blur.

The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are.

Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy!

My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

What are you waiting for in order to give up?

To act is to anchor in the imminent future.

If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.

What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?

Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.

He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.

Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

Basis of society: anonymous sweat.

Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.