Emile M. Cioran Quotes - Page 8

The curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing now but mask and ghost.

The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. Why call him a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot.

Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.

Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.

To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.

Hungarian Language — savage it may be but of a beauty that has nothing human about it, with sonorities of another universe, powerful and corrosive, appropriate to prayer, to groans and to tears, risen out of hell to perpetuate its accent and its aura…words of nectar and cyanide.

Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.

When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

If a man has not, by the time he is thirty, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism—I don't know whether he is to be admired or scorned, regarded as a saint or a corpse.

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

We must learn how to explode! Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage.

A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It’s not easy to be on the wrong foot with life.

To live in any true sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must be able to renounce, to do oneself violence, to act against one's own nature, to weaken oneself; we conceive freedom only for ourselves - we extend it to our neighbours only at the cost of exhausting efforts; whence the precariousness of liberalism, a defiance of our instincts, a brief and miraculous success, a state of exception, at the antipodes of our deepest imperatives.

You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.

The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.

A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.

To live entirely without a goal! I have glimpsed this state, and have often attained it, without managing to remain there: I am too weak for such happiness.

We derive our vitality from our store of madness.

Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy.

All philosophers should end their days at Pythia's feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.

To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.

An individual dies ... when, instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being, he cowers within, and takes refuge there.

The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?