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Advice
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A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.
-E. M. Cioran
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Age
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Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart's drama and the negative meaning of history.
-E. M. Cioran
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Anger
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Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.
-E. M. Cioran
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Birth
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Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.
-E. M. Cioran
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Communism
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We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
-E. M. Cioran
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Conversation
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Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
-E. M. Cioran
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A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.
-E. M. Cioran
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Criticism
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Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
-E. M. Cioran
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Discontent
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Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
-E. M. Cioran
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Discovery
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The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.
-E. M. Cioran
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Dreams
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Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
-E. M. Cioran, The Tempation to Exist
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Ego
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The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are.
-E. M. Cioran
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Enthusiasm
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We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
-E. M. Cioran
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Evil
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Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.
-E. M. Cioran
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Fame
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To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
-E. M. Cioran
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Fanaticism
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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.
-E. M. Cioran
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Fear
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Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent --unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it --we perpetuate it within ourselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude.
-E. M. Cioran
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Freedom
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What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?
-E. M. Cioran
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God
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God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
-E. M. Cioran
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A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
-E. M. Cioran
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Grief, Grieving
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No one can keep his grieves in their prime; they use themselves up.
-E. M. Cioran
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Habits
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To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.
-E. M. Cioran
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Identity
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If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
-E. M. Cioran
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Justice
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Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
-E. M. Cioran
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Language
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One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland --and no other.
-E. M. Cioran
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Books by and about E. M. Cioran