Emil Cioran
Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.Collection: Jealousy
Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.Collection: Happiness
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.Collection: Society
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.Collection: Freedom
The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.Collection: Death
Our first intuitions are the true ones.Collection: Brainy
What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.Collection: Moving
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.Collection: Imagination
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.Collection: Intelligence
To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.Collection: Hope
No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.Collection: Freedom
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?Collection: Nature
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.Collection: Fear
My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.Collection: Time
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
Under each formula lies a corpse.
In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.
So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.
Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.
We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.
The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.
One should live and die where one was born... I've been bored everywhere I went. What was the point of leaving Coasta Boacu?
We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
God - a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.
Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.
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.
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
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.
I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.
I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.
Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.
We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.
When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.