The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men. — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest. — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration. — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes. — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment. — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity? — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
Man started out on the wrong foot. The misadventure in paradise was the first consequence. The rest had to follow. — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of… — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers. — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty-the sideshow of second… — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil. — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this… — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. Why call… — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
Those who believe in their truth -- the only ones whose imprint is retained by the memory of men -- leave the… — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the… — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer. As soon as they consent… — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime... — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots. — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who… — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity? — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors. — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions. — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
"The Holy Ghost," Luther instructs us, "is not a skeptic." Not everyone can be, and that is really too bad. — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death! — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea. — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say:… — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed… — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful. — Emile M. Cioran Copy Share Image
