Quotes from Emil Cioran

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.

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.

Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.

Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

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.

In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.

In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.

Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.

We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.

Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.

I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.

A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.

To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.

The Universal view melts things into a blur.

It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.

We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

Pankaj Mishra