"If our fellow men could be aware of our opinions about them, love, friendship, and devotion would be forever erased from the dictionaries; and if we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame."

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More quotes from: Emile M. Cioran

• "A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed. "
• "A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate. "
• "A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself. "
• "A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment ..."
• "A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and ..."
• "A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions. "
• "A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: ..."
• "Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen. "
• "Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the ..."
• "Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter. "
• "Balkans - that taste for devastation, for internal clutter, for a universe like a brothel ..."
• "Basis of society: anonymous sweat. "
• "Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant ..."
• "By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing. "
• "Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself. "
• "Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh. "
• "Consciousness is nature's nightmare. "
• "Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires. "
• "Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves. "
• "Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested ..."
• "Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by ..."
• "Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created ..."
• "Each time you find yourself at a turning point, the best thing is to lie ..."
• "Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart. "
• "Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation. "
• "Everything is pathology, except for indifference. "
• "For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it ..."
• "Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, ..."
• "Glory - once achieved, what is it worth? "
• "Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off. "
• "I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul. "
• "I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers. "
• "I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has ..."
• "I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual. "
• "I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd ..."
• "I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged ..."
• "I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously? "
• "If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination ..."
• "If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot. "
• "If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices. "
• "Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant ..."
• "Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had ..."
• "In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys ..."
• "In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more ..."
• "In most cases we attach ourselves to God in order to take revenge on life, ..."
• "In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary. "
• "Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers. "
• "Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom? "
• "It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: In truth it ..."
• "It is because of speech that men give the illusion of being free. By speaking, ..."
• "It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other. "

• "It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too ..."
• "Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion. "
• "Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our ..."
• "Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ..."
• "Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui. "
• "Life inspires more dread than death-it is life which is the great unknown. "
• "Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken ..."
• "Life is nothing; death, everything. Yet there is nothing which is death, independent of life. ..."
• "Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory. "
• "Man is unacceptable. "
• "Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action ..."
• "Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows. "
• "Maniacs of Procreation, bipeds with devalued faces, we have lost all appeal for each other. "
• "Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity. "
• "Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness. "
• "Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long ..."
• "Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to ..."
• "No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great ..."
• "No one can enjoy freedom without trembling. "
• "No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever ..."
• "Not to be obliged, like so many others, to choose between the insipid and the ..."
• "Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty. "
• "Nothing proves that we are more than nothing. "
• "Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil. It is ..."
• "One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our ..."
• "One hardly saves a world without ruling it. "
• "Our contortions, visible or secret, we communicate to the planet; already it trembles even as ..."
• "Our first intuitions are the true ones. "
• "Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ..."
• "Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is ..."
• "Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers. "
• "Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas. "
• "Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors. "
• "Pursued by our origins... we all are. "
• "Reality is a creation of our excesses. "
• "Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness. "
• "Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim. "
• "Russia - immensity and suffocation. "
• "Saints live in flames, wisemen, next to them. "
• "Schisms and heresies are nationalisms in disguise. "
• "Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls. "
• "So long as man is protected by madness-he functions-and flourishes. "
• "Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one ..."
• "Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who ..."
• "Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that ..."
• "That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is ..."
• "The "west" - what curse has fallen upon it that at the term of its ..."
• "The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed ..."
• "The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the ..."
• "The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth. "

• "The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself. "
• "The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to ..."
• "The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into ..."
• "The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on ..."
• "The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, ..."
• "The Universal view melts things into a blur. "
• "There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be. "
• "To act is to anchor in the imminent future. "
• "To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world. "
• "To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an ..."
• "To Foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be ..."
• "To live is to lose ground. "
• "To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself. "
• "To live... in any sense of the word... is to reject others; to accept them, ..."
• "To think is to take a cunning revenge in which we camoflage our baseness and ..."
• "To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice ..."
• "To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten. "
• "Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young. "
• "Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee ..."
• "Truths begin by a conflict with the police- and end by calling them in. "
• "Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that ..."
• "Under each formula lies a corpse. "
• "Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism. "
• "Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world. "
• "We are afraid of the enormity of the possible. "
• "We are all secularized anarchist today. "
• "We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves. "
• "We change ideas like neckties. "
• "We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade ..."
• "We derive our vitality from our store of madness. "
• "We die in proportion to the words we fling around us. "
• "We inhabit a language rather than a country. "
• "We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us. "
• "We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune. "
• "Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed ..."
• "What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated ..."
• "What is pity but the vice of kindness. "
• "What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation. "
• "What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name- and moving on. "
• "What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, ..."
• "What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his? "
• "When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves. "
• "Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots ..."
• "Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we ..."
• "Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned ..."
• "Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea. "
• "Word - that invisible dagger. "
• "Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would ..."
• "You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving ..."