Quotes from Emil M. Cioran

It is no nation that we inhabit, but a language." "Make no mistake; our native tongue is our true fatherland.

Society - an inferno of saviors!

No longer wanting to be a man..., dreaming of another form of failure.

I am stirred, even overwhelmed each time I happen upon an innocent person. Where does he come from? What is he after? Doesn't such an apparition herald some disaster? It is a very special disturbance we suffer in the presence of someone there is no way of calling our kind.

If everyone had seen through everything, if everyone had "understood," history would have ceased long since. But we are fundamentally, biologically unsuited to "understand." And even if everyone understood except for one, history would be perpetuated because of that one, because of his blindness. Because of a single illusion!

When you live past the age of rebellion, and you still rebel, you seem to yourself a kind of senile Lucifer.

What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.

What's wrong--what's the matter with you?' Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for....

Fanaticism is the death of conversation. We do not gossip with a candidate for martyrdom. What are we to say to someone who refuses to penetrate our reasons and who, the moment we do not bow to his, would rather die than yield? Give us dilettantes and sophists, who at least espouse all reasons...

In each letter I send to a Japanese friend, I have got into the habit of recommending one or another work by Brahms, She has just written that she is leaving a Tokyo clinic where she was taken by ambulance for having excessively sacrificed to my idol, I wonder which trio, which sonata was responsible. It doesn't matter. Whatever induces collapse is thereby deserving of being listened to.

I do not interrupt him, I let him weigh each man's merits, waiting for him to tell me off.... His incomprehension of others is astounding. Subtle and ingenuous both, he judges you as if you were an entity or a category. Time having had no hold over him, he cannot admit that I am outside of whatever he forbids, that nothing of what he favors still concerns me. Dialogue becomes pointless with someone who escapes the procession of the years. I ask those I love to be kind enough to grow old.

I infallibly discern a flaw in all those who are interested in the same things as myself. . . .

Ä°çgüdüsel olarak putlara tapt???m?zdan, düÅŸlerimizin ve ç?karlar?m?z?n nesnelerini kay?ts?z ÅŸarts?z ÅŸeyler haline getiririz.

I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person

A patrimony all our own: the hours when we have done nothing. . . . It is they that form us, that individualize us, that make us dissimilar.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

Life is legalized, consecrated absurdity.

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities

Sauve qui peut.

The universal view melts things into a blur

If the French have loaded nostalgia with too much clarity, if they have deprived it of a certain intimate and dangerous prestige; Sehnsucht, on the other hand, exhausts what is insoluble in the conflicts of the German soul, torn between the Heimat and the Infinite.

Not to haw been born, merely musing on that-what happiness, what freedom, what space!

How easy it is to believe yourself a god by the heart, and how hard it is to be one by the mind!

The truth we do not always pursue; but when we do so passionately, violently, we hate whatever is expression, whatever derives from words and forms, all the noble lies, even further from the truth than the vulgar ones.