Quotes By Emile M. Cioran

The Universal view melts things into a blur.

Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.

The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.

We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.

We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

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.

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.

The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.

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

The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.

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.

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.

For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.

In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.

Word - that invisible dagger.

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

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

Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.