Quotes by
Emile M. Cioran |
1911-1995 , French-Romanian philosopher
Philosopher and essayist, who published works in both Romanian and French. Cioran was born in Resinár (Rășinari), Szeben County, which was part of Austria-Hungary at the time. His work has been noted for its pervasive philosophical pessimism, and frequently engaged with issues of suffering, decay, and nihilism.
Among his best known works are On the Heights of Despair (1934) and The Trouble with Being Born (1973). Cioran's first French book, A Short History of Decay, was awarded the prestigious Rivarol Prize in 1950.
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Quotations
| • | One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death's prisoner. 20 |
| • | To be or not to be… Neither one nor the other. 14 |
| • | The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one. 11 |
| • | The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell. 9 |
| • | Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers. 7 |
| • | I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws. 7 |
| • | Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil. 7 |
| • | When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation. 7 |
| • | To hope is to contradict the future. 7 |
| • | If someone incessantly drops the word “life,” you know he's a sick man. 7 |
| • | I would like to be free, totaly free... free like an aborted child. 6 |
| • | Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart. 6 |
| • | Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates. 6 |
| • | Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest? 6 |
| • | Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived. 6 |
| • | Stoicism for show: to be an enthusiast of nil admirari, an hysteric of ataraxia. 5 |
| • | We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly. 5 |
| • | What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been! 5 |
| • | I am displeased with everything. If they made me God, I would immediately resign. 5 |
| • | I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable. 5 |
| • | Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation. 5 |
| • | How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void. 4 |
| • | We are afraid of the enormity of the possible. 4 |
| • | Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. 4 |
| • | If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth. 4 |
| • | Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears. 4 |
| • | A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints. 4 |
| • | Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth. 4 |
| • | Skepticism is an exercise in defascination. 4 |
| • | Profound thinkers are only the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous 4 |
| • | Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions. 4 |
| • | Hope is the normal form of delirium. 4 |
| • | Tears do not burn except in solitude. 4 |
| • | There are issues which, once approached, either isolate you or kill you outright. 4 |
| • | Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die? 3 |
| • | Society: an inferno of saviors! 3 |
| • | Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. 3 |
| • | No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim. 3 |
| • | In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future. 3 |
| • | Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism. 3 |
| • | What are you waiting for in order to give up? 3 |
| • | The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor. 3 |
| • | The Creation was the first act of sabotage. 3 |
| • | Boredom is a larval anxiety; depression, a dreamy hatred. 3 |
| • | Everything is pathology, except for indifference. 1 |
