The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
E. M. Forster
Related
I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. ...
KELLY JONES When a man takes one step toward God, God takes more steps toward that man than there are sands in t...
THE WORK OF THE CHARIOT When the enemy is relaxed, make them toil. When full, starve them. When settled, make them move.
SUN TZU The unfortunate thing is that, sometimes, we slip, but, fortunately, consciously or unconsciously, w...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH I don't know if I have a favorite color.
KATE MIDDLETON It's very special having a new little girl.
KATE MIDDLETON The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.
OSCAR WILDE Hard to restrain, unstable is this mind; it flits wherever it lists. Good it is to control the mind....
GAUTAMA BUDDHA She said 'Over my dead body!' so I took her at her word.
DIANA WYNNE JONES The end of the world is a strange concept. The world is always ending, and the end is always being a...
NEIL GAIMAN What is the Other?" they ask.
The Other is the one who taught me whatI should be like, but not ...
PAULO COELHO Look, my friends!' he called. 'Here's a pretty hobbit-skin to wrap an elven princeling in! If it wer...
J.R.R. TOLKIEN When each and every believer rises up to serve others and function according to their capacity, the ...
HENRY HON It's all to do with the training: you can do a lot if you're properly trained.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II Like all best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II My husband has quite simply been my strength and stay all these years, and I owe him a debt greater ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II It is easy enough to define what the Commonwealth is not. Indeed this is quite a popular pastime.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I have to be seen to be believed.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I have in sincerity pledged myself to your service, as so many of you are pledged to mine. Throughou...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I hope that tomorrow we can all, wherever we are, join in expressing our grief at Diana's loss, ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I myself prefer my New Zealand eggs for breakfast.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II The British constitution has always been puzzling and always will be.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I have behind me not only the splendid traditions and the annals of more than a thousand years but t...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II To what greater inspiration and counsel can we turn than to the imperishable truth to be found in th...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II What were once only hopes for the future have now come to pass; it is almost exactly 13 years since ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II First, I want to pay tribute to Diana myself. She was an exceptional and gifted human being. In good...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I cannot lead you into battle. I do not give you laws or administer justice but I can do something e...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts an...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II Grief is the price we pay for love.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II The upward course of a nation's history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II At its heart, engineering is about using science to find creative, practical solutions. It is a nobl...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II At Christmas, I am always struck by how the spirit of togetherness lies also at the heart of the Chr...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II For many, Christmas is also a time for coming together. But for others, service will come first.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II The lessons from the peace process are clear; whatever life throws at us, our individual responses w...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your s...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II Therefore I am sure that this, my Coronation, is not the symbol of a power and a splendor that are g...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the man...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II Madam President, speaking here in Dublin Castle it is impossible to ignore the weight of history, as...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II These wretched babies don't come until they are ready.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I know of no single formula for success. But over the years I have observed that some attributes of ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II The events that I have attended to mark my Diamond Jubilee have been a humbling experience. It has t...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II In remembering the appalling suffering of war on both sides, we recognise how precious is the peace ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II Like all the best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II No one who knew Diana will ever forget her. Millions of others who never met her, but felt they knew...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I have been aware all the time that my peoples, spread far and wide throughout every continent and o...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II Here was one with an air of high nobility such as Aragorn at times revealed, less high perhaps, yet ...
J.R.R. TOLKIEN Hail to you gods, on that day of the great reckoning. Behold me, I have come to you, without sin, wi...
THE BOOK OF THE DEAD She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer ...
ANGELA CARTER The profound ability to use aural and written language has enabled our species to collectively explo...
KATHERINE VUCICEVIC No, sweet one. See, my precious: if we has it, then we can escape, even from Him, eh? Perhaps we gro...
J.R.R. TOLKIEN May I never neither turn left nor turn right in my journey of life, but may I go straight to Christ ...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH We'll sort of get over the marriage first and then maybe look at the kids. But obviously we want...
PRINCE WILLIAM Family is the most important thing in the world.
PRINCESS DIANA You philosophers are lucky men. You write on paper and paper is patient. Unfortunate Empress that I ...
CATHERINE THE GREAT With the right help, children have a good chance of overcoming their issues while they are still you...
KATE MIDDLETON As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend.
KING SOLOMON I don't mind a big fascinator. I think there is more scope for artwork in a fascinator rather th...
ZARA PHILLIPS I was always told from the hat-makers that you should have your hair up because it shows the hat mor...
ZARA PHILLIPS I don't think I'll still be riding at 40. There are a couple of people who are still riding ...
ZARA PHILLIPS My dad's not a big talker.
ZARA PHILLIPS My dad can be pretty critical sometimes.
ZARA PHILLIPS I'd love to have kids, but not at the moment.
ZARA PHILLIPS You cannot make horses 'safe.'
ZARA PHILLIPS Virtually everything that gets printed about me is wrong anyway, so it doesn't really matter wha...
ZARA PHILLIPS It's stupid to say that I don't like being in the public eye, but I don't like doing stu...
ZARA PHILLIPS I'm an affectionate person.
ZARA PHILLIPS People still text me to say that there is something about me in the paper, and what really annoys me...
ZARA PHILLIPS Sometimes people will come up in the street and say: 'My daughter loves you, will you sign an au...
ZARA PHILLIPS Taking part in an Olympics on home ground is something you dream about.
ZARA PHILLIPS My brother and I have been able to get on and have been very lucky to do things with our family that...
ZARA PHILLIPS I don't think about the media.
ZARA PHILLIPS I love the sport and being competitive.
ZARA PHILLIPS The horses are all characters, all personalities. Some you get along with, some you don't, some ...
ZARA PHILLIPS I hate having my picture taken.
ZARA PHILLIPS Unfortunately in sport it's either good or bad. You've got to take the highs and the lows.
ZARA PHILLIPS My mother is massively into sailing, so we always had Musto clothes, and it went on from there, real...
ZARA PHILLIPS The senior members of the royal family work very hard and I don't think people quite realise tha...
ZARA PHILLIPS In our sport you're very lucky to find a horse of a lifetime and I found mine relatively early. ...
ZARA PHILLIPS I don't have a stylist, and I do most of my shopping online, just because it's easier. I don...
ZARA PHILLIPS I think Facebook's dangerous. So many people I know get into trouble with Facebook... I'd ra...
ZARA PHILLIPS I'm not a princess anyway so I find that quite weird to be labelled as one.
ZARA PHILLIPS Smoking is hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, and dangerous to the lungs.
KING JAMES I My dear mamma is quite right when she says that we must lay down principles and not depart from them...
MARIE ANTOINETTE I never make a trip to the United States without visiting a supermarket. To me they are more fascina...
WALLIS SIMPSON PS: It's all gossip about the prince. I'm not in the habit of taking my girlfriends' bea...
WALLIS SIMPSON I am so anxious for you not to abdicate and I think the fact that you do is going to put me in the w...
WALLIS SIMPSON I hate this place. I shall hate it to my grave.
WALLIS SIMPSON I look a hundred and weigh 110 - you won't love me when you see the wreck England has made me.
WALLIS SIMPSON A woman's life can really be a succession of lives, each revolving around some emotionally compe...
WALLIS SIMPSON Never explain, never complain.
WALLIS SIMPSON You have no idea how hard it is to live out a great romance.
WALLIS SIMPSON I have always had the courage for the new things that life sometimes offers.
WALLIS SIMPSON For a gallant spirit there can never be defeat.
WALLIS SIMPSON Forgive me for not writing but this man is exhausting.
WALLIS SIMPSON You can never be too rich or too thin.
WALLIS SIMPSON A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.
KING SOLOMON It seems to me that man is made to act rather than to know: the principles of things escape our most...
FREDERICK THE GREAT Addiction is a hugely complex and destructive disease, and its impact can be simply devastating. All...
KATE MIDDLETON There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.
MARIE ANTOINETTE I have seen all, I have heard all, I have forgotten all.
MARIE ANTOINETTE
More E. M. Forster
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for...
E. M. FORSTER We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.
E. M. FORSTER What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our d...
E. M. FORSTER To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the ...
E. M. FORSTER History develops, art stands still.
E. M. FORSTER How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
E. M. FORSTER I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
E. M. FORSTER Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.
E. M. FORSTER We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.
E. M. FORSTER The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in...
E. M. FORSTER Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
E. M. FORSTER Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
E. M. FORSTER Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to l...
E. M. FORSTER Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism.
E. M. FORSTER Love is always being given where it is not required.
E. M. FORSTER The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in...
E. M. FORSTER Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.
E. M. FORSTER I'm a holy man minus the holiness.
E. M. FORSTER A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing ...
E. M. FORSTER The idea that nations should love one another, or that business concerns or marketing boards should ...
E. M. FORSTER Death destroys a man, the idea of Death saves him.
E. M. FORSTER The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of an...
E. M. FORSTER Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
E. M. FORSTER Unless we remember we cannot understand.
E. M. FORSTER We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the stat...
E. M. FORSTER Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
E. M. FORSTER America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be inter...
E. M. FORSTER There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one d...
E. M. FORSTER Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who ...
E. M. FORSTER Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both wil...
E. M. FORSTER Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves...
E. M. FORSTER I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people...
E. M. FORSTER Ideas are fatal to caste.
E. M. FORSTER Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orde...
E. M. FORSTER Failure or success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wr...
E. M. FORSTER As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through e...
E. M. FORSTER Oxford is -- Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates t...
E. M. FORSTER Lord I disbelieve -- help thou my unbelief.
E. M. FORSTER Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when...
E. M. FORSTER Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sp...
E. M. FORSTER I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too,...
E. M. FORSTER The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will ...
E. M. FORSTER A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy d...
E. M. FORSTER Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; ...
E. M. FORSTER Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is neg...
E. M. FORSTER The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
E. M. FORSTER If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the gu...
E. M. FORSTER Another distinguished critic has agreed with Gide--that old lady in the anecdote who was accused by ...
E. M. FORSTER At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
E. M. FORSTER Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
E. M. FORSTER Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality...
E. M. FORSTER Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of...
E. M. FORSTER The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the ...
E. M. FORSTER Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage ou...
E. M. FORSTER One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
E. M. FORSTER I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gon...
E. M. FORSTER They go too far because they do not reflect what personality is. Just as words have two functions - ...
E. M. FORSTER I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my frie...
E. M. FORSTER Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
E. M. FORSTER I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.
E. M. FORSTER But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.
E. M. FORSTER Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order...
E. M. FORSTER We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a n...
E. M. FORSTER Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventu...
E. M. FORSTER Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.
E. M. FORSTER So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
E. M. FORSTER There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.
E. M. FORSTER Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.
E. M. FORSTER Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of ma...
E. M. FORSTER Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.
E. M. FORSTER Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
E. M. FORSTER What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the cond...
E. M. FORSTER . . . the crime of suicide lies rather in its disregard for the feelings of those whom we leave behi...
E. M. FORSTER Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageab...
E. M. FORSTER Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothin...
E. M. FORSTER Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the ...
E. M. FORSTER Life -- No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.
E. M. FORSTER I believe we shall come to care about people less and less. The more people one knows the easier it ...
E. M. FORSTER Only connect.
E. M. FORSTER The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.
E. M. FORSTER Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what t...
E. M. FORSTER So, Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism
E. M. FORSTER It is the one orderly product our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels,...
E. M. FORSTER There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playi...
E. M. FORSTER They go forth with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts. An undevelo...
E. M. FORSTER I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gon...
E. M. FORSTER Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that shoul...
E. M. FORSTER The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little fart...
E. M. FORSTER I have been racking my brains and can find no reply [to] this very reasonable question. I can only s...
E. M. FORSTER A facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade, every type of dubiousness.
E. M. FORSTER I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people...
E. M. FORSTER For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge tha...
E. M. FORSTER The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.
E. M. FORSTER The best way to know Alexandria is to wander aimlessly
E. M. FORSTER Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.
E. M. FORSTER If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
E. M. FORSTER This opera is my Nunc Dimittis, in that it dismisses me peacefully and convinces me I have achieved.
E. M. FORSTER You remember how he would trust strangers, and if they fooled him he would say, 'It's better to be f...
E. M. FORSTER But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to mer...
E. M. FORSTER Unless we remember we cannot understand
E. M. FORSTER It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the...
E. M. FORSTER The so-called white races are really pinko-grey
E. M. FORSTER I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me...
E. M. FORSTER I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.
E. M. FORSTER At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes
E. M. FORSTER Away she hurried, not beautiful, not supremely brilliant, but filled with something that took the pl...
E. M. FORSTER Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's
E. M. FORSTER Some twenty years her senior, he preserved a gift that she supposed herself to have already lost--no...
E. M. FORSTER You can transmute love, muddle it, ignore it... but you can never pull it out of you...
E. M. FORSTER Ideas are fatal to caste
E. M. FORSTER Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.
E. M. FORSTER Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who ...
E. M. FORSTER It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.
E. M. FORSTER Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.
E. M. FORSTER One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.
E. M. FORSTER Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.
E. M. FORSTER England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.
E. M. FORSTER I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and...
E. M. FORSTER Reverence is fatal to literature.
E. M. FORSTER Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
E. M. FORSTER One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such exp...
E. M. FORSTER People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, ...
E. M. FORSTER No one is India.
E. M. FORSTER The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herse...
E. M. FORSTER I am certainly an ought and not a must.
E. M. FORSTER It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.
E. M. FORSTER The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.
E. M. FORSTER Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
E. M. FORSTER The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
E. M. FORSTER No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.
E. M. FORSTER Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.
E. M. FORSTER At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.
E. M. FORSTER The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
E. M. FORSTER I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too,...
E. M. FORSTER The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a p...
E. M. FORSTER One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
E. M. FORSTER Some closing of the gates is inevitable after thirty, if the mind itself is to become a creative pow...
E. M. FORSTER I believe we shall come to care about people less and less. The more people one knows the easier it ...
EDWARD M. FORSTER Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something...
EDWARD M. FORSTER Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; ...
EDWARD M. FORSTER Lord I disbelieve -- help thou my unbelief.
EDWARD M. FORSTER Unless we remember we cannot understand.
EDWARD M. FORSTER Ideas are fatal to caste.
EDWARD M. FORSTER Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage ou...
EDWARD M. FORSTER Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when...
EDWARD M. FORSTER At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
EDWARD M. FORSTER The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the ...
EDWARD M. FORSTER 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 The difference between a boss and a leader: a boss says, 'Go!' - a leader says, 'Let's go!'
E. M. KELLY 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 Few persons are made of such strong fiber that they will make a costly outlay when surface work will...
E. M. BOUNDS 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 The difference between a boss and a leader: a boss says, 'Go!' -a leader says, 'Let's go!'.
E. M. KELLY 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 the...
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 Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encount...
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 Earnestness is good and impressive: genius is gifted and great. Thought kindles and inspires, but it...
E. M. BOUNDS Prayer is the creator as well as the channel of devotion. The spirit of devotion is the spirit of pr...
E. M. BOUNDS We love orthodoxy. It is good. It is the best. It is the clean, clear cut teaching of God's Word, th...
E. M. BOUNDS 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