We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficienc...
EMIL M. CIORAN I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I ...
EMIL M. CIORAN It has been a long time since philosophers have read men’s souls. It is not their task, we are tol...
EMIL M. CIORAN We must learn how to explode! Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage.
EMIL M. CIORAN Magnificat de Bach. Remué jusqu'aux larmes. Il est impossible que ce qui s'y exprime n'ait q...
EMIL M. CIORAN As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.
EMIL M. CIORAN It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
EMIL M. CIORAN Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.
EMIL M. CIORAN Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, prec...
EMIL M. CIORAN By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
EMIL M. CIORAN Our only choice is between irrespirable truths and salutary frauds.
EMIL M. CIORAN The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.
EMIL M. CIORAN Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first momen...
EMIL M. CIORAN Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.
EMIL M. CIORAN The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.
EMIL M. CIORAN Tristetea, ca si suferinta, ne revela existenta, deoarece în ele avem în constiinta separatia noas...
EMIL M. CIORAN If you try to convert someone, it will never be to
effect his salvation but to make him suffer ...
EMIL M. CIORAN We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.
EMIL M. CIORAN It is no sign of benediction to have been obsessed with the lives of saints, for it is an obsession ...
EMIL M. CIORAN I have no ideas, only obsessions. Anybody can have ideas. Ideas have never caused anybody's downfall...
EMIL M. CIORAN Word — That invisible dagger.
EMIL M. CIORAN My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out. I a...
EMIL M. CIORAN Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference an...
EMIL M. CIORAN Les mystiques et leurs «  œuvres  complètes ». Quand on s'adresse à Dieu, et à Dieu seul, co...
EMIL M. CIORAN A book is a suicide postponed.
EMIL M. CIORAN True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire w...
EMIL M. CIORAN Dans les époques de stérilité, on devrait hiberner, dormir jour et nuit pour conserver ses forces...
EMIL M. CIORAN Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
EMIL M. CIORAN By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from...
EMIL M. CIORAN Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow me...
EMIL M. CIORAN Niciodată nu te voi trăda de tot, deşi te-am trădat şi te voi trăda la fiecare pas; Când te-a...
EMIL M. CIORAN Sînt unii oameni atît de prosti, ca de le-ar aparea vreo idee la suprafata creierului ea s-ar sinu...
EMIL M. CIORAN In numele si sub teroarea ei (plictiselii, n.m.) parasesc oamenii caminul si moartea agreabila legat...
EMIL M. CIORAN S'il n'avait gardé une dernière illusion, je me réclamerais volontiers d'Omar Khayyam, de ses tri...
EMIL M. CIORAN To live entirely without a goal! I have glimpsed this state, and have often attained it, without man...
EMIL M. CIORAN Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, havin...
EMIL M. CIORAN Só é saudável em nós aquilo pelo que não somos especificamente nós mesmos: são nossas aversõ...
EMIL M. CIORAN Of all that was attempted this side of nothingness, is anything more pathetic than this world, excep...
EMIL M. CIORAN My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out ... ...
EMIL M. CIORAN If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing it. EMIL M. CIORAN Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist—a demo...
EMIL M. CIORAN Eu nu am idei ci obsesii. Idei poate avea oricine. Nimeni nu s-a prăbușit din cauza ideilor.
EMIL M. CIORAN أشعر أنني منفصل تماما عن كل البلدان وعن كل المجموعات. أ�...
EMIL M. CIORAN The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live-moreover, the only one.
EMIL M. CIORAN Between the demand to be clear,and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves...
EMIL M. CIORAN Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me...
EMIL M. CIORAN Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
EMIL M. CIORAN At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, i...
EMIL M. CIORAN When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, “What’s your rush? You ...
EMIL M. CIORAN Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.
EMIL CIORAN However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to ...
EMIL CIORAN I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosoph...
EMIL CIORAN I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sit...
EMIL CIORAN Injustice constitutes the essence of social life.
EMIL CIORAN The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothing...
EMIL CIORAN One should live and die where one was born... I've been bored everywhere I went. What was the po...
EMIL CIORAN Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's eq...
EMILE M. CIORAN Everything is pathology, except for indifference.
EMILE M. CIORAN The Universal view melts things into a blur.
EMILE M. CIORAN Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
E. M. CIORAN The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
E. M. CIORAN If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
E. M. CIORAN One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland --and n...
E. M. CIORAN Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people...
E. M. CIORAN A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its se...
E. M. CIORAN Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal ther...
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 A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals h...
E. M. CIORAN Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations ...
E. M. CIORAN Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
E. M. CIORAN To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
E. M. CIORAN Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untain...
E. M. CIORAN A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
E. M. CIORAN God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
E. M. CIORAN Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent --unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaus...
E. M. CIORAN What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striv...
E. M. CIORAN Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
E. M. CIORAN When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances,...
E. M. CIORAN It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
E. M. CIORAN The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose atte...
E. M. CIORAN Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not fi...
E. M. CIORAN Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ours...
E. M. CIORAN Those who believe in their truth -- the only ones whose imprint is retained by the memory of men -- ...
E. M. CIORAN What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
E. M. CIORAN Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
E. M. CIORAN Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist --a demo...
E. M. CIORAN Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.
E. M. CIORAN No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are ...
E. M. CIORAN We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
E. M. CIORAN The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, th...
E. M. CIORAN Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than...
E. M. CIORAN The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.
E. M. CIORAN Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
E. M. CIORAN To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.
E. M. CIORAN No one can keep his grieves in their prime; they use themselves up.
E. M. CIORAN The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for on...
E. M. CIORAN Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.
E. M. CIORAN We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone wo...
E. M. CIORAN Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.
E. M. CIORAN Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with o...
E. M. CIORAN Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal ther...
EMILE M. CIORAN Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal the...
E. M. CIORAN The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for on...
EMILE M. CIORAN The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for on...
E. M. CIORAN Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encount...
E. M. CIORAN A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
EMILE M. CIORAN Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
EMILE M. CIORAN The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose atte...
EMILE M. CIORAN Our first intuitions are the true ones.
EMILE M. CIORAN Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
EMILE M. CIORAN Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.
EMILE M. CIORAN Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
EMILE M. CIORAN Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.
EMILE M. CIORAN Word - that invisible dagger.
EMILE M. CIORAN Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
EMILE M. CIORAN The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
EMILE M. CIORAN No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
EMILE M. CIORAN Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
EMILE M. CIORAN Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately consci...
EMILE M. CIORAN Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal ther...
E. M. CIORAN Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
EMILE M. CIORAN Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
EMILE M. CIORAN Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
EMILE M. CIORAN My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderer...
EMILE M. CIORAN Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
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 s...
E. M. CIORAN Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor ...
EMILE M. CIORAN Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
EMILE M. CIORAN We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
EMILE M. CIORAN A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
EMILE M. CIORAN The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for on...
EMILE M. CIORAN Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
EMILE M. CIORAN So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.
EMILE M. CIORAN Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not fi...
EMILE M. CIORAN The "west" - what curse has fallen upon it that at the term of its trajectory it produces only these...
EMILE M. CIORAN The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.
EMILE M. CIORAN Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ...
EMILE M. CIORAN Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
EMILE M. CIORAN If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
EMILE M. CIORAN To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel...
EMILE M. CIORAN Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
EMILE M. CIORAN A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
EMILE M. CIORAN What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
EMILE M. CIORAN What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
EMILE M. CIORAN Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the ...
EMILE M. CIORAN Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.
EMILE M. CIORAN Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a...
EMILE M. CIORAN I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
EMILE M. CIORAN Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
EMILE M. CIORAN There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
EMILE M. CIORAN To be modern is to tinker with the incurable.
EMILE M. CIORAN Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and inven...
EMILE M. CIORAN The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to ot...
EMILE M. CIORAN Our contortions, visible or secret, we communicate to the planet; already it trembles even as we do,...
EMILE M. CIORAN To live... in any sense of the word... is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do on...
EMILE M. CIORAN Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massac...
EMILE M. CIORAN Maniacs of Procreation, bipeds with devalued faces, we have lost all appeal for each other.
EMILE M. CIORAN Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.
EMILE M. CIORAN It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
EMILE M. CIORAN The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.
EMILE M. CIORAN You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: i...
EMILE M. CIORAN Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
EMILE M. CIORAN One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and n...
EMILE M. CIORAN Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ru...
EMILE M. CIORAN In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
EMILE M. CIORAN Man is unacceptable.
EMILE M. CIORAN I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged in...
EMILE M. CIORAN In most cases we attach ourselves to God in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify ...
EMILE M. CIORAN If our fellow men could be aware of our opinions about them, love, friendship, and devotion would be...
EMILE M. CIORAN We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
EMILE M. CIORAN It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.
EMILE M. CIORAN We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.
EMILE M. CIORAN We inhabit a language rather than a country.
EMILE M. CIORAN Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you...
EMILE M. CIORAN We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
EMILE M. CIORAN A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more effic...
EMILE M. CIORAN No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
EMILE M. CIORAN Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
EMILE M. CIORAN The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
EMILE M. CIORAN In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
EMILE M. CIORAN For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
EMILE M. CIORAN The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.
EMILE M. CIORAN Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
EMILE M. CIORAN A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
EMILE M. CIORAN The beauty of flames lies in their strange play, beyond all proportion and harmony. Their diaphanous...
EMILE M. CIORAN The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
EMILE M. CIORAN We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
EMILE M. CIORAN Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.
EMILE M. CIORAN Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.
EMILE M. CIORAN Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so...
EMILE M. CIORAN When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
EMILE M. CIORAN Not to be obliged, like so many others, to choose between the insipid and the atrocious.
EMILE M. CIORAN To Foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by t...
EMILE M. CIORAN Pursued by our origins... we all are.
EMILE M. CIORAN If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
EMILE M. CIORAN Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untain...
EMILE M. CIORAN Under each formula lies a corpse.
EMILE M. CIORAN You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: i...
EMILE M. CIORAN Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
EMILE M. CIORAN