A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.
E. M. Cioran
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
E. M. Cioran
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
E. M. Cioran
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
E. M. Cioran
Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.
E. M. Cioran
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
E. M. Cioran
Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.
E. M. 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.
E. M. Cioran
It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
E. M. Cioran
Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.
E. M. Cioran
Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
E. M. Cioran
No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.
E. M. Cioran
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
E. M. Cioran
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.
E. M. Cioran
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
E. M. Cioran
Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.
E. M. Cioran
Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
E. M. Cioran
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
E. M. Cioran
The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
E. M. Cioran
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
E. M. Cioran
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
E. M. Cioran
To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer. As soon as they consent to live, the unbeliever and the man of faith are fundamentally the same, since both have made the only decision that defines a being.
E. M. Cioran
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
E. M. Cioran
We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
E. M. Cioran
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
E. M. 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.
E. M. Cioran
|
Type:
Philosopher
Date of Birth:
1911-04-08
Year of Death:
1995
Nationality:
French |
