E. M. Cioran quotes
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
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.
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.
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.
It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.
Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.
Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer. As soon as they consent to live, the unbeliever and the man of faith are fundamentally the same, since both have made the only decision that defines a being.
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
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.