E. M. Cioran Quotes

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"Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there."
Dreams

"No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one."

"You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the "mystery" of life."

"Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth."

"Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation."

"Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh."

"To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten."

"Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil."

"Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish."

"A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech."

"There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be."

"Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves."

"Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off."

"No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it."

"One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other."

"Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors."

"Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself."

"The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one."

"What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?"

"The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself."