Emil Cioran Quotes

The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so...

I seem to myself, among civilised men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It's not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.

To act is to anchor in the imminent future.

This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears.

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion.

In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left...with a foolish grin.

For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

Sadness makes you God's prisoner.

In theory, it matters little to me whether I live as whether I die; in practice, I am lacerated by every anxiety which opens an abyss between life and death.

Saints live in flames; wise men, next to them.

An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.