What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.


E. M. Forster

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It is what it is, it is what you make it.
JAMES DURBIN
Life is weird and wonderful like that, is it not.
SONYA.E.WILLIAMS
I regret that I wasn't more successful with my marriages, but it is what it is.
TED TURNER
You know, I don't think my music is important, I don't think it's changing the world, I ...
SUFJAN STEVENS
The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing, but newspapers.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you...
C. JOYBELL C.
The king may rule the kingdom, but it's the queen who moves the board.
D.M. TIMNEY
Unpredictability means what it means. I don't know how you define it. It is what it is.
MICHAEL KEATON
They go too far because they do not reflect what personality is. Just as words have two functions - ...
E. M. FORSTER
Integrity is not everything, but it is the only thing that matters.
JEFFREY FRY
It is what it is, and it ain't nothin' else... Everything is clearly, openly, plainly delive...
DAN FLAVIN
With '10,000,' our aim was to make a film that was entertaining and a roller-coaster ride; i...
STEVEN STRAIT
When I die it will be game over,... but I know one life is short, to be selfish is not the best deci...
DEYTH BANGER
I never like it when a celebrity goes on Twitter and says, 'This isn't true!' It is what...
HARRY STYLES
It is what it is. I balled out, had some good years, man, had fun and did it with some guys and made...
CALVIN JOHNSON
If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
I am Happy and satisfied with what I am. 10000 will take me wrong, 1000 will go against me, 100 will...
NEHA KOTHARI
If our mind was an ocean then every now and then we would have the perfect storm happening in it.Gar...
GARY F EVANS...
I saw that there is no Nature,
That Nature doesn’t exist,
That there are hills, valleys,...
ALBERTO CAEIRO
See the world for what it is.
BEAUTIFUL!
ANTHONY T. HINCKS
There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes eve...
G. K. CHESTERTON
There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes ev...
G. K. CHESTERTON
It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
To stand on the
brink of what is coming, feeling eager, optimistic anticipation—with no feeli...
ASK AND IT IS GIVEN
Are you the man who reads phone books?
THOMAS PYNCHON
A hero: a man or woman who is unsatisfied by his condition, and resolves to do something about it.
BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA
Things don’t have significance: they only have existence.
Things are the only hidden meaning ...
ALBERTO CAEIRO
You get to the point where you're like, 'I'm just doing me, and if people don't like...
BEBE REXHA
I’m glad I see with my eyes and not the pages I’ve read.
ALBERTO CAEIRO
The heart is deceitful and wicked in everyone; the Holy Spirit changes even the most wretched sinner...
NORM TOMLINSON
Woe unto you if you have come to this world just to fear man,for man is nothing but ordinary dust wi...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
The power of man;Man does not only have the power to accomplish great & unbelievable things in life,...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
Boxing's a poor man's sport. We can't afford to play golf or tennis. It is what it is. I...
SUGAR RAY LEONARD
Tell your story to the universe and Let your actions speak LOVE.' No matter what it is.
NAPZ CHERUB PELLAZO
The man who reads only for improvement is beyond the hope of much improvement before he begins.
JONATHAN DANIELS
Obama is a great man who's just beginning to understand the realities. And I'm not just sayi...
E. L. DOCTOROW
Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn't believe he is dead.
H. L. MENCKEN
The Madden Curse has really taken on a life of its own. People just love talking about it, and it is...
DREW BREES
I'm probably the least harsh on myself, and I try not to scrutinize everything about my body. As...
KOURTNEY KARDASHIAN
It takes two to make every great career: the man who is great, and the man-almost rarer-who is great...
AYN RAND
When he admires the man he calls his father--a man who is slightly above 'the scum of the earth', wh...
TERRY A O'NEAL
The man held himself still and turned his milk-flooded eyes on her. Fin felt something like vertigo ...
A.S. PETERSON
I'm actually writing history. It isn't what you'd call big history. I don't write ab...
LOUIS L'AMOUR
She buys "mixed salad greens" for seven dollars a bag, triple-washed with who knows what. And to get...
RUDOLPH DELSON
I have Tourettes and Aspergers, but Tourrets and Aspergers don't have me. You know, I'm doin...
JAMES DURBIN
It is a lie.
ARTHUR MILLER
I take the good with the bad. I always wanted to be a comic, and part of that, for me, was that I wa...
ERIK GRIFFIN
'Merry Wives of Windsor' is a wonderful machine. It's one of the great farces, and it...
ROGER REES
We all are wearing many hundred glasses of different colors. Therefore, everyone sees the world in d...
MUDITHA CHAMPIKA
Literature... is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the mo...
PAUL DE MAN
Man is what he reads.
JOSEPH BRODSKY
To search the sands of a lost desert for truth and justice in this world today you might as well be ...
GARY F EVANS...
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone...
OCTAVIO PAZ
It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.
SENECA (SENECA THE ELDER)
It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.
LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA
It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.
SENECA
To be honest, there are no problems between me and Messi. People have their own opinions about who t...
CRISTIANO RONALDO
The man stopped talking and was looking at the sunset.
But what does someone who hates and love...
ALBERTO CAEIRO
I love to read about anger. A "feel bad" book always makes me feel good. And no other novel in the h...
JOHN WATERS
The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own o...
HENRY MILLER
Today is about the now, the moment you live in, so do now what you want to do
SOTONYE ANGA
When you're recording to analog tape, it captures performance and you can't necessarily mani...
DAVE GROHL
What is said of a man is nothing. The point is, who says it.
OSCAR WILDE
If I have any desire at all, it is to show the brotherhood of man. This is a big statement and it so...
WILLIAM SAROYAN
I'm living with every step. I can't live with regret. The past is the past. I'm not worr...
RYAN SHECKLER
Who is a great man? A great man is a person whom people are dying to write books about.
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
To the man who reads 'Scouting for Boys' superficially, there is a disappointing lack of rel...
ROBERT BADEN-POWELL
What is opportunity to the man who can't use it?
GEORGE ELIOT
A mere literary man is a dull man; a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man; but when ...
SAMUEL JOHNSON
It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
H. L. MENCKEN
The man who complains about the way the ball bounces is likely the one who dropped it.
LOU HOLTZ
Blind is the man who thinks he knows it all. Blinder is the man who follows after this man blindly.
TRAVIS J HEDRICK
Never trust a man who reads only one book.
ARTURO PéREZ-REVERTE
I speak the truth. Not everyone who says they are ready to hear it really are.
MONIKA ZANDS
Everyone is the Umbrella Man and he is everyone. Every cough, sneeze, smile and wave means both ever...
CRAIG CLEVENGER
If I knew I was going to die tomorrow,
And Spring came the day after tomorrow,
I would die...
ALBERTO CAEIRO
Between what i see in a field and what I see in another field
There passes for a moment the fig...
ALBERTO CAEIRO
It’s an already inside outside,
The philosophers say it’s the soul
But it’s not the ...
ALBERTO CAEIRO
Do I believe a thing has limits!? Of course! Nothing exists that doesn’t have limits. Existence me...
ÁLVARO DE CAMPOS
Not everybody wants be texting their 15-year-old asking how his math tutor was. They would rather be...
RENEE JAMES
A great man is the man who does something for the first time.
ALEXANDER SMITH
It is the idle man, not the great worker, who is always complaining that he has no time or opportuni...
ORISON SWETT MARDEN
Life is not all about sticking or stopping your thoughts to old memories but LIFE STARTS when you st...
NEHA KOTHARI
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone...
OCTAVIO PAZ
A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychi...
JEROME LAWRENCE
Your mind is a Microcosm of strength and power. There’s all the magic you need in it. When all els...
CHINONYE J. CHIDOLUE
The present generation, wearied by its chimerical efforts, relapses into complete indolence. Its con...
SOREN KIERKEGAARD
The misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of b...
JOSS WHEDON
It is not the situation that makes the man, but the man who makes the situation.
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
It is not the situation that makes the man, but the man who makes the situation.
FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON
Public opinion contains all kinds of falsity and truth, but it takes a great man to find the truth i...
G. W. F. HEGEL
We all know, the ones who play golf, know what a wonderful game it is and what a great past-time it ...
BERNHARD LANGER
Dedication is the preparation to success!
WERNER BOTHA
You know, there's nothing you can do about your public image. It is what it is. I just try to do...
CHRISTOPHER WALKEN
For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds /
Nothing that is no...
WALLACE STEVENS
Many times, the right man gets outnumbered by false and wrong people while the other true and honest...
APURVA GAGLANI
How do I know what I think until I see what I say?
E.M. FORSTER
I believe in aristocracy, though -- if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an ...
E.M. FORSTER
What comes, when it comes, will be what it is.
ALBERTO CAEIRO

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
. . . 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 work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that ...
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