Emile M. Cioran
Emile M. Cioran
NationalityRomanian
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth8 April 1911
CountryRomania
years long twenties
What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.
mean long-ago done
If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.
unique forever suffering
This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique - and insignificant.
art anomalies way
As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.
hurt pain real
Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.
flames fire trying
An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.
suffering limits
There is no limit to suffering.
people defects seems
I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.
hate humble
He who hates himself is not humble.
law void belief
Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.
memories believe men
Those who believe in their truth -- the only ones whose imprint is retained by the memory of men -- leave the earth behind them strewn with corpses. Religions number in their ledgers more murders than the bloodiest tyrannies account for, and those whom humanity has called divine far surpass the most conscientious murderers in their thirst for slaughter.
pride revelations
What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.
insomnia paradise torture
Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.
silence speech mouths
Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.