Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
EMIL CIORAN, History & Utopia
Jealousy — that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.
EMIL CIORAN, History & Utopia
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.
EMIL CIORAN, A Short History of Decay
I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.
EMIL CIORAN, The Trouble with Being Born
Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.
EMIL CIORAN, History & Utopia
Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone.
EMIL CIORAN, The New Gods
The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable.
EMIL CIORAN, A Short History of Decay
We inhabit a language rather than a country.
EMIL CIORAN, Anathemas and Admirations
Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
EMIL CIORAN, History & Utopia
Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?
EMIL CIORAN, History & Utopia
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.
EMIL CIORAN, History & Utopia
Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
EMIL CIORAN, History & Utopia
Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain.
EMIL CIORAN, A Short History of Decay
If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned — a saint or a corpse.
EMIL CIORAN, History & Utopia
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
EMIL CIORAN, A Short History of Decay
No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile. Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of someday meeting yourself again.
EMIL CIORAN, "Strangled Thoughts", The New Gods
Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.
EMIL CIORAN, The Trouble with Being Born
The curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing now but mask and ghost.
EMIL CIORAN, A Short History of Decay
When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.
EMIL CIORAN, History & Utopia
The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.
E. M. CIORAN, The Trouble with Being Born
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula ... to give a facade to the void.
EMIL CIORAN, A Short History of Decay
