Quotations by Author

Emile Cioran

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

Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.

My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

No human beings are 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.

Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

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

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

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

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

We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.

Word - that invisible dagger.

When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

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