Best 309 quotes of Emile M. Cioran on MyQuotes

A book has to dig through the wounds, more, it has cause a new one, a book it has to be dangerous.

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.

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

A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.

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

Afflicted with existence, each man endures like an animal the consequences which proceed from it. Thus, in a world where everything is detestable, hatred becomes huger than the world and, having transcended its object, cancels itself out.

After having struggled madly to solve all problems, after having suffered on the heights of despair, in the supreme hour of revelation, you will find that the only answer, the only reality, is silence.

A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice.

A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.

A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society

All great ideas should be followed by an exclamation mark - a warning signal similar to the skull and crossbones drawn on high-voltage transformers.

All people see fires, storms, explosions, or landscapes; but how many feel the flames, the lightnings, the whirlwinds, or the harmony? How many have an inner beauty that tinges their melancholy?

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

All that shimmers on the surface of the world, all that we call interesting, is the fruit of ignorance and inebriation.

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

Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.

A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.

A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

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

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

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

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

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

As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.

A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime.

A sensation must have fallen very low to deign to turn into an idea.

As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?

As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.

A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.

Between the demand to be clear,and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect.

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

Boredom dismantles the mind, renders it superficial, out at the seams, saps it from within and dislocates it.

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.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

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

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

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

Consciousness is nature's nightmare.

Consider love: is there a nobler outpouring, a rapture less suspect? Its shudders rival music, compete with the tears of solitude and of ecstasy: sublime...but a sublimity inseperable from the urinary tract: transports bordering upon excretion, a heaven of the glands, sudden sancitity of the orifices. It takes no more than a moment of attention for this intoxication, shaken, to cast you back into the ordures of physiology or a moment of fatigue to recognize that so much ardor produces only a variety of mucous.

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

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.

Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.

Discretion is deadly to genius; ruinous to talent.

Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

Doubt works deep within you like a disease or, even more effectively, like a faith.