Emile M. Cioran
Emile M. Cioran
NationalityRomanian
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth8 April 1911
CountryRomania
regret feet easy
A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It’s not easy to be on the wrong foot with life
world melancholy ends
Vague a l'ame — melancholy yearning for the end of the world.
motive left
One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.
philosophy believe sadness
Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy!
girl philosophical fighting
As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?
cynical democracy mediocrity
Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.
mean world degrees
To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life.
mean solitude sole
The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.
progress generations injustice
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
missions kill-me murderer
My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.
powerful prayer tears
Hungarian Language — savage it may be but of a beauty that has nothing human about it, with sonorities of another universe, powerful and corrosive, appropriate to prayer, to groans and to tears, risen out of hell to perpetuate its accent and its aura…words of nectar and cyanide.
flames light hatred
I am the beast with a contorted grin, contracting down to illusion and dilating toward infinity, both growing and dying, delightfully suspended between hope for nothing and despair of everything, brought up among perfumes and poisons, consumed with love and hatred, killed by lights and shadows. My symbol is death of light and the flame of death. Sparks die in me only to be reborn as thunder and lightning. Darkness itself glows in me.
fall ubiquity fire
Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor and revolt, a perplexity on fire.
being-yourself chaos chaos-in-the-world
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.