EMIL CIORAN, A Short History of Decay
A book is a suicide postponed.
EMIL CIORAN, The Trouble with Being Born
Consciousness is nature's nightmare.
EMIL CIORAN, Tears and Saints
For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
EMIL CIORAN, History & Utopia
There was a time when time did not yet exist.
EMIL CIORAN, The Trouble with Being Born
True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.
EMIL CIORAN, Drawn and Quartered
Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?
EMIL CIORAN, Tears and Saints
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
EMIL CIORAN, A Short History of Decay
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
EMIL CIORAN, History & Utopia
Man started out on the wrong foot. The misadventure in paradise was the first consequence. The rest had to follow.
EMIL CIORAN, The Trouble with Being Born
Tears do not burn except in solitude.
EMIL CIORAN, On the Heights of Despair
A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society.
EMIL CIORAN, History & Utopia
So long as man is protected by madness, he functions and flourishes.
EMIL CIORAN, A Short History of Decay
A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
EMIL CIORAN, History & Utopia
I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.
EMIL CIORAN, On the Heights of Despair
A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.
EMIL CIORAN, A Short History of Decay
Life inspires more dread than death — it is life which is the great unknown.
EMIL CIORAN, A Short History of Decay
What is pity but the vice of kindness.
EMIL CIORAN, History & Utopia
God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
EMIL CIORAN, The Trouble with Being Born
It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
EMIL CIORAN, The Trouble with Being Born
Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.
EMIL CIORAN, All Gall Is Divided
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
EMIL CIORAN, A Short History of Decay
To act is to anchor in the imminent future.
EMIL CIORAN, History & Utopia
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, The Trouble with Being Born
Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.
EMIL CIORAN, History & Utopia
What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.
EMIL CIORAN, History & Utopia
A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.
EMIL CIORAN, The Trouble with Being Born
The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion, when the intuition of disaster is so painful that it almost provokes a greater madness.... One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.
EMIL CIORAN, On the Heights of Despair
Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
EMIL CIORAN, A Short History of Decay
I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.
EMIL CIORAN, On the Heights of Despair
Word — that invisible dagger.
EMIL CIORAN, History & Utopia
Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist -- a demonic, elemental, bestial pessimist -- only when life has been defeated many times in its fight against depression. Then destiny emerges in man's consciousness as a form of the irreparable.
E. M. CIORAN, On the Heights of Despair
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
E. M. CIORAN, "Strangled Thoughts", The New Gods
He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.
EMIL CIORAN, The Fall Into Time
Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other.
EMIL CIORAN, Drawn and Quartered
