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Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.

Emile M. Cioran
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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.
Emile M. Cioran
Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
Emile M. Cioran
A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
Emile M. Cioran
God - a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
Emile M. Cioran
What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.
Emile M. Cioran
Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.
Emile M. Cioran
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.
Emile M. Cioran
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
Emile M. Cioran
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
Emile M. Cioran
Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.
Emile M. Cioran
If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
Emile M. Cioran
The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.
Emile M. Cioran
Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
Emile M. Cioran
We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.
Emile M. Cioran
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
Emile M. Cioran
We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
Emile M. Cioran
Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.
Emile M. Cioran
Under each formula lies a corpse.
Emile M. Cioran
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
Emile M. Cioran
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
Emile M. Cioran
Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
Emile M. Cioran
One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
Emile M. Cioran
Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
Emile M. Cioran
For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
Emile M. Cioran
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
Emile M. Cioran
We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
Emile M. Cioran
The Universal view melts things into a blur.
Emile M. Cioran
Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.
Emile M. Cioran
Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.
Emile M. Cioran
In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
Emile M. Cioran
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.
Emile M. Cioran
We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
Emile M. Cioran
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
Emile M. Cioran
A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
Emile M. Cioran
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
Emile M. Cioran
To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.
Emile M. Cioran
The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
Emile M. Cioran
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
Emile M. Cioran
My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.
Emile M. Cioran
Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.
Emile M. Cioran
Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
Emile M. Cioran
A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
Emile M. Cioran
The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
Emile M. Cioran
I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
Emile M. Cioran
I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.
Emile M. Cioran
Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.
Emile M. Cioran
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
Emile M. Cioran
Word - that invisible dagger.
Emile M. Cioran