Quotes from Emile M. Cioran

On Creating — What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures.

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.

A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.

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

Man is a robot with defects.

When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.

Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.

To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.

I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.

True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.

As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.

All people see fires, storms, explosions, or landscapes; but how many feel the flames, the lightnings, the whirlwinds, or the harmony? How many have an inner beauty that tinges their melancholy?

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death!

All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.

An existence transfigured by failure.

No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.

Doubt works deep within you like a disease or, even more effectively, like a faith.

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

The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion... One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.

To Foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by the hatred smothered within.

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.