Emile M. Cioran
Emile M. Cioran
NationalityRomanian
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth8 April 1911
CountryRomania
men saving paradise
Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise.
years cells firsts
To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell
dream genius
We are all geniuses when we dream.
world illusion destroying
Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other.
civilization self advice
A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.
life prayer men
To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer. As soon as they consent to live, the unbeliever and the man of faith are fundamentally the same, since both have made the only decision that defines a being.
religious profound fragility
Every profound dissatisfaction is of a religious nature: our failures derive from our incapacity to conceive of paradise and to aspire to it, as our discomforts from the fragility of our relations with the absolute.
belief martyr dangerous
No human beings are more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief
despair tasks lucidity
Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.
time rejection nostalgia
There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.
solitude protect ifs
You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.
love-is heaven solitude
Consider love: is there a nobler outpouring, a rapture less suspect? Its shudders rival music, compete with the tears of solitude and of ecstasy: sublime...but a sublimity inseperable from the urinary tract: transports bordering upon excretion, a heaven of the glands, sudden sancitity of the orifices. It takes no more than a moment of attention for this intoxication, shaken, to cast you back into the ordures of physiology or a moment of fatigue to recognize that so much ardor produces only a variety of mucous.
ifs
If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
disaster release phenomenon
The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.