Quotes from Emile M. Cioran

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

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.

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

Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.

We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

L'Occident : une pourriture qui sent bon, un cadavre parfumé.

Sein heisst in der Klemme sein.

The hour of crime does not sound at the same time for all peoples. Hence, the permanence of history.

Po przejÅ›ciu powa?nej choroby w niektórych krajach Azji, na przykÅ'ad w Laosie, zdarza siÄ™ zmienia? imiÄ™. Có? za wizja u ?ródeÅ' takiego zwyczaju! Po prawdzie, powinno siÄ™ zmienia? imiÄ™ po ka?dym wa?nym doÅ›wiadczeniu.

It has been a long time since philosophers have read men's souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.

If a man has not, by the time he is thirty, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism—I don't know whether he is to be admired or scorned, regarded as a saint or a corpse.

In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.

I do not want to see BP nickel and diming these businesses that are having a tough time.

What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.

The Art of Love: knowing how to combine the temperament of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone.

Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.

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

It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: in truth, it is itself the quintessence of injustice.

If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: "I want to be praised."

We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.