Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
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More quotes from Emile M. Cioran
Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.
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Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.
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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.
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What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
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When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
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We define only out of despair, we must have a formula… to give a facade tot he void.
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A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
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The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.
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Everything is pathology, except for indifference.
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I’m simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
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What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name – and moving on.
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No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
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If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
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By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
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It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
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If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
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Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
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Glory – once achieved, what is it worth?
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The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
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The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
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My mission is to kill time, and time’s to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.
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Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
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Negation is the mind’s first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.
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Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
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Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.
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Word – that invisible dagger.
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One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland – and no other.
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Our first intuitions are the true ones.
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The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live – moreover, the only one.
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A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
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Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
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Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.
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Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
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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.
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Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
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To act is to anchor in the imminent future.
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What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
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In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
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Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
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The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
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Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
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Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
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The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.
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To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.
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Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.
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Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
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A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
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The Universal view melts things into a blur.
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In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
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The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
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We inhabit a language rather than a country.
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We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
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Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
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We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
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A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
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Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
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Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.
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Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.
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Life inspires more dread than death – it is life which is the great unknown.
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Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
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Under each formula lies a corpse.
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We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
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Jealousy – that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.
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To Live signifies to believe and hope – to lie and to lie to oneself.
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Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher’s the poet’s equal there.
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In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
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It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.
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Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
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What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you – what a revelation.
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Isn’t history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
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To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
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Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
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To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.
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Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
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We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.
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A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation’s paradise and its tomb.
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Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
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So long as man is protected by madness – he functions – and flourishes.
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Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
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Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.
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Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
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Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.
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Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven’t been cut off.
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God – a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
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Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
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I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
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Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
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The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.
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Tolerance – the function of an extinguished ardor – tolerance cannot seduce the young.
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We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
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I have no nationality – the best possible status for an intellectual.
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We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
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The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.
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There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
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One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
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For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
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No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
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Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.
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Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
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Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
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Truths begin by a conflict with the police – and end by calling them in.
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We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
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Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
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