Emile Cioran Quotes
A Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language.
(1911 - 1995)
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A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
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A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
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A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself...
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A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society.
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A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.
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A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
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A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
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A phantom cannot be cured, still less an enlightened mind. We can only cure those who belong to the earth and still have their roots in it, however superficial.
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A relief bordering on orgasm at the notion that one will never again embrace a cause, any cause...
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A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...
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A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.
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After a sleepless night, the people in the street seem automatons. No one seems to breathe, to walk, Each looks as if he is worked by clockwork: nothing spontaneous; mechanical smiles, spectral gesticulations. Yourself a specter, how would you see others as alive?
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All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.
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Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
[Ambition]
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An impostor, a "humbug," conscious of being so and therefore a self-spectator, is necessarily more advanced in knowledge than a steady mind full of merits and all of a piece.
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An individual dies ... when, instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being, he cowers within, and takes refuge there.
[Risks]
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Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
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Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.
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Balkans - that taste for devastation, for internal clutter, for a universe like a brothel on fire... the last "primitives" in Europe.
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Basis of society: anonymous sweat.
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