Quotes By Emile M. Cioran

Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.

If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.

My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

We inhabit a language rather than a country.

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

Everything is pathology, except for indifference.

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.

Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.

So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.

A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.

We derive our vitality from our store of madness.

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.

We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.

Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.

To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.