Top 108 Quotes & Sayings by Emil Cioran - Page 2

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran.

Last updated on November 16, 2024.

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

Emil Cioran

In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.

Emil Cioran

When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

Emil Cioran

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

Emil Cioran

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.

Emil Cioran

So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.

Emil Cioran

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.

Emil Cioran

Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.

Emil Cioran

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.

Emil Cioran

To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel you are consubstantial with that future.

Emil Cioran

One should live and die where one was born... I've been bored everywhere I went. What was the point of leaving Coasta Boacu?

Emil Cioran

We derive our vitality from our store of madness.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

Emil Cioran

Under each formula lies a corpse.

Emil Cioran

The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.

Emil Cioran

I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.

Emil 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.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.

Emil Cioran

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.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?

Emil Cioran

Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

Emil Cioran

It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.