Emil Cioran Quotes

The need to devour oneself absolves one of the need to believe.

As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.

Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself.

On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I."

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die. — Didn't you know that's how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?

To try curing someone of a "vice," of what is the deepest thing he has, is to attack his very being, and this is indeed how he himself understands it, since he will never forgive you for wanting him to destroy himself in your way and not his.

I long to be free — desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.

Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.

Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.

The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are. If we had the right sense of our position in the world, if to compare were inseparable from to live, the revelation of our infinitesimal presence would crush us. But to live is to blind ourselves to our own dimensions. . . .