Quotes By Emile M. Cioran

The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.

Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.

God - a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.

To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel you are consubstantial with that future.

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?

Under each formula lies a corpse.

Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.

Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.

I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?

When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.

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.

Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.

I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.

Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.

The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.

Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.