504 Quotes by Emil Cioran

To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall?

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

Discretion is deadly to genius; ruinous to talent.

True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one’s victories as defeats.

The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

No human beings are more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief.

The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?

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.