Quotes from Emil M. Cioran

German endurance knows no limits — even in madness: Nietzsche endured his eleven years, Hölderlin forty.

Our epoch will be marked by the romanticism of the stateless. Already apparent is the image of a universe in which no one will have droit de cité. Inside every citizen nowadays lies a future alien.

Être moderne, c'est bricoler dans l'incurable.

If you love your independence, you must lend yourself, in order to protect it, to every turpitude; you must risk ignominy itself.

Truth remains hidden to the man filled with desire and hatred" (Buddha)…. Which is to say, to every man alive.

The more gifted a man is, the less progress he makes on the spiritual level. Talent is an obstacle to the inner life.

Nothing more aggravating than a seamless, unremitting irony which leaves you no time to breathe and still less to think; which instead of being inconspicuous, occasional, is massive, automatic, at the antipodes of its essentially delicate nature. Which in any case is how it is used in Germany, a nation which, having meditated upon it the most, is least capable of wielding it.

Conversation is fruitful only between minds given to consolidating their perplexities.

Inelegant to reproach a man for his sterility, when that is his postulate, his mode of achievement, his dream….

The only moments I think of with relief are those when I sought to be nothing for anyone, when I blushed at the notion of leaving the slightest trace in the memory of a single human being...

Stoicism for show: to be an enthusiast of nil admirari, an hysteric of ataraxia.

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

Saintliness is a special kind of madness. While the madness of mortals exhausts itself in useless and fantastic actions, holy madness is a conscious effort towards winning everything.

A foretold misfortune, when at last it occurs, is ten, is a hundred times harder to endure than one we did not expect. All during our apprehensions, we lived through it in advance, and when it happens these past torments are added to the present ones, and together they form a mass whose weight is intolerable.

To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell.

Vocea viorii este zgomotul pe care-l face, deschizandu-se, poarta paradisului.

Wisdom is the last word of a dying civilization, the halo of historical sunsets, fatigue turned into a worldview, the final tolerance before the rise of fresher gods—and barbarism.

What right have we to be annoyed by someone who calls us a monster? The monster is unique by definition, and solitude, even the solitude of infamy, supposes something positive, a peculiar election, but undeniably an election.

The dissolving power of conversation. One realizes why both meditation and action require silence.

There is no false sensation.

The West: a sweet-smelling rottenness, a perfumed corpse.

All great events have been set in motion by madmen, by mediocre madmen. Which will be true, we may be sure, of the "end of the world" itself.

A man who survives himself despises himself without acknowledging as much, sometimes without even knowing as much.

La sola risposta al nulla sta nell'illusione. E' quasi un fatto biologico. È la nostra sostanza stessa. Non è illusione, è qualcosa di più. Ma ciò vuole anche dire che il pericolo della vita consiste nell'esagerare col rigore, nello spingersi troppo oltre. Questione di temperamento. Un'altra cosa spiacevole nella vita è l'astio. L'astioso è un incattivito che si attribuisce una sorta di superiorità.