Saints live in flames, wisemen, next to them.
Emile M. Cioran
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Emile M. Cioran quotes
A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and it's tomb.
A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.
Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
Everything is pathology, except for indifference.
For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?
I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul.
I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.
I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.
Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.
Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
Life inspires more dread than death-it is life which is the great unknown.
Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
Maniacs of Procreation, bipeds with devalued faces, we have lost all appeal for each other.
Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
Not to be obliged, like so many others, to choose between the insipid and the atrocious.
Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.
Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.
Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
Saints live in flames, wisemen, next to them.
So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.
The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.
The Universal view melts things into a blur.
To act is to anchor in the imminent future.
To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.
To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.
To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.
Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
Truths begin by a conflict with the police- and end by calling them in.
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.
We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
We inhabit a language rather than a country.
We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.
We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.
What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name- and moving on.
When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
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