Emile M. Cioran
Emile M. Cioran
NationalityRomanian
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth8 April 1911
CountryRomania
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.
rejection violence accepting
To live... in any sense of the word... is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence.
passion reality men
Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.
self flaws easy
How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.
void infinite throwing
How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.
enemy ends decided
I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.
history mind degradation
History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.
cancer men tree
Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.