Emile M. Cioran

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

— Emile M. Cioran

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

— Emile M. Cioran

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

— Emile M. Cioran

Humanity adores only those who cause it to perish.

— Emile M. Cioran

Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.

— Emile M. Cioran

To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.

— Emile M. Cioran

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

— Emile M. Cioran

Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.

— Emile M. Cioran

The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.

— Emile M. Cioran

There is not much difference between a mortal man and a dying man. The absurdity of making plans is only slightly more…

— Emile M. Cioran

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

— Emile M. Cioran

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

— Emile M. Cioran

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

— Emile M. Cioran

I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.

— Emile M. Cioran

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

— Emile M. Cioran

Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.

— Emile M. Cioran

What strangely enchanted tunes gush forth during those sleepless nights!

— Emile M. Cioran

If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.

— Emile M. Cioran

True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.

— Emile M. Cioran

Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

— Emile M. Cioran

Once you see that everything is unreal, you can't see why you should bother to prove it.

— Emile M. Cioran

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

— Emile M. Cioran

No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.

— Emile M. Cioran

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

— Emile M. Cioran

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.

— Emile M. Cioran

An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.

— Emile M. Cioran

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

— Emile M. Cioran

How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.

— Emile M. Cioran

No one can keep his griefs in their prime; they use themselves up.

— Emile M. Cioran

All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.

— Emile M. Cioran

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.

— Emile M. Cioran

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.

— Emile M. Cioran

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

— Emile M. Cioran

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

— Emile M. Cioran

Every form of talent involves a certain shameless-ness.

— Emile M. Cioran

Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.

— Emile M. Cioran

My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission.

— Emile M. Cioran

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.

— Emile M. Cioran

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

— Emile M. Cioran

It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

— Emile M. Cioran