504 Quotes by Emil Cioran

To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!

For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.

All philosophers should end their days at Pythia’s feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.

I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.

Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don’t suffer, time flows, so that they don’t live in time, in fact they never have.

If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.