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Emile M. Cioran [1911-1995] Romanian

Emil Cioran was a Romanian philosopher and essayist, who published works in both Romanian and French. Cioran was born in Resinár, Szeben County, which was part of Austria-Hungary at the time.

Fear, Brainy, Freedom, Happiness, Hope, Imagination, Intelligence, Jealousy, Moving On, Nature, Power, Society, Time

Quote	Tags	Rank
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?	Nature	101
However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.	Power	101
A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.		102
Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.		102
Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.	Time	103
I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.		103
Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.		104
The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.		104
My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.		105
I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.		105
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.		106
One should live and die where one was born... I've been bored everywhere I went. What was the point of leaving Coasta Boacu?		106
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.		107
Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.		108
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.		109
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.	Fear	110
The Universal view melts things into a blur.		111
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.	Society	112
Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.		113
Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.	Jealousy	114
Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.	Power	115
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.		116
Word - that invisible dagger.		117
We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.	Hope	118
What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.	Moving On	119
Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.		120
We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.		121
Our first intuitions are the true ones.	Brainy	122
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.		123
The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.	Fear	124
Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.		125
We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.		126
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.		201
You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.		202
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.		203
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.		204
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.		205
Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.	Happiness	206
Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.		207
Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.		208
So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.		209
It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.		210
No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.	Freedom	211
One hardly saves a world without ruling it.		212
Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.		213
I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?		214
Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.		215
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.		216
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.		217
It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.		218
Everything is pathology, except for indifference.		219
A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.		220
The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.		221
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.		222
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.		223
We derive our vitality from our store of madness.		224
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?		225
I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.		226
Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.		301
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.		302
Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.		303
The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.		304
A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.		305
The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.		306
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.		307
Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.		308
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.	Imagination	309
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.		310
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.		311
Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.		312
Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.		313
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.	Intelligence	314
To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.		315
We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.		316
When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.		317
Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.		318
For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.		319
A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.		320
Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.		321
Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.		322
In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.		323
To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.		324
If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.		325
In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.		326
The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.		401
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.		402
Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?		403
God - a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.		404
Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.		405
Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.		406
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.		407
Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.		408
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.		409
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.		410
Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?		411
Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.		412
A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.		413
I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.		414
We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.		415
Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.		416
What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.		417
We inhabit a language rather than a country.		418
The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.		419
Under each formula lies a corpse.		420
The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.		421
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.		422
To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.		423
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.		424

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