Emile Cioran Quotes (31 Quotes)

Our contortions, visible or secret, we communicate to the planet already it trembles even as we do, it suffers the contagion of our crises and, as this grand mal spreads, it vomits us forth, cursing us the while.

Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.

To Foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by the hatred smothered within.

The beauty of flames lies in their strange play, beyond all proportion and harmony. Their diaphanous flare symbolizes at once grace and tragedy, innocence and despair, sadness and voluptuousness. The burning transcendence has something of the lightness of great purifications. I wish the fiery transcendence would carry me up and throw me into a sea of flames, where, consumed by their delicate and insidious tongues, I would die an ecstatic death. The beauty of flames creates the illusion of a pure, sublime death similar to the light of dawn. Immaterial, death in flames is like a burning of light, graceful wings. Do only butterflies die in flames What about those devoured by the flames within them.

Balkans - that taste for devastation, for internal clutter, for a universe like a brothel on fire the last primitives in Europe.

Life is nothing death, everything. Yet there is nothing which is death, independent of life. It is precisely this absence of autonomous, distinct reality which makes death universal it has no realm of its own, it is omnipresent, like everything which lacks identity, limit, and bearing an indecent infinitude.

It is because of speech that men give the illusion of being free. By speaking, they deceive themselves, as they deceive others because they say what they are going to do, who could suspect they are not masters of their actions

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

To be modern is to tinker with the incurable.

Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil. It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.

Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.

If our fellow men could be aware of our opinions about them, love, friendship, and devotion would be forever erased from the dictionaries and if we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame.

Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.

What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free

Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself - there is no wish I make more often .

Knowledge subverts love in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.

Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself.

In most cases we attach ourselves to God in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify we can do without it, that we have found something better, and we also attach ourselves to God in horror of men.

The curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing now but mask ghost.

It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound In truth it is itself the quintessence of injustice.

Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do where to go Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.

Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.

If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned - a saint or a corpse.

Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.

To live... in any sense of the word... is to reject others to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence.

What is pity but the vice of kindness.

Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death

You are alive only when you live by the skin of your teeth.

The west - what curse has fallen upon it that at the term of its trajectory it produces only these businessmen, these shopkeepers, these racketeers with their blank stares and atrophied smiles... is it with such vermin as this that a civilization so delicate and so complex must come to an end

I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.

To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.