Emile M. Cioran

Consciousness is nature's nightmare.

— Emile M. Cioran

Society: an inferno of saviors!

— Emile M. Cioran

The universal view melts things into a blur.

— Emile M. Cioran

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

— Emile M. Cioran

Normal people have nothing to forget.

— Emile M. Cioran

What are you waiting for in order to give up?

— Emile M. Cioran

Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.

— Emile M. Cioran

We change ideas like neckties.

— Emile M. Cioran

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

— Emile M. Cioran

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.

— Emile M. Cioran

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

— Emile M. Cioran

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

— Emile M. Cioran

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

— Emile M. Cioran

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

— Emile M. Cioran

The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.

— Emile M. Cioran

One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.

— Emile M. Cioran

To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the…

— Emile M. Cioran

What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it…

— Emile M. Cioran

In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.

— Emile M. Cioran

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

— Emile M. Cioran

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing; but instead of nonchalantly promenading our own corruption, we exude our…

— Emile M. Cioran

Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.

— Emile M. Cioran

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

— Emile M. Cioran

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

— Emile M. Cioran

Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be…

— Emile M. Cioran

The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of…

— Emile M. Cioran

In most cases we attach ourselves to in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify we can do…

— Emile M. Cioran

Thinking should be like musical meditation. Has any philosopher pursued a thought to its limits the way Bach or Beethoven develop and…

— Emile M. Cioran

The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity… Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does…

— Emile M. Cioran

No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity;––for thoughts, there is…

— Emile M. Cioran

I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my…

— Emile M. Cioran

Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day.…

— Emile M. Cioran

Consider love: is there a nobler outpouring, a rapture less suspect? Its shudders rival music, compete with the tears of solitude and…

— Emile M. Cioran

The reaction against your own thought in itself lends life to thought. How this reaction is born is hard to describe, because…

— Emile M. Cioran

Try to be free: you will die of hunger.

— Emile M. Cioran

Basis of society: anonymous sweat.

— Emile M. Cioran

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

— Emile M. Cioran

We inhabit a language rather than a country.

— Emile M. Cioran

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

— Emile M. Cioran

Word - that invisible dagger.

— Emile M. Cioran