504 Quotes by Emil Cioran

I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.

If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an ‘I’ without shame.

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.

What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you – what a revelation.

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.

I have no nationality – the best possible status for an intellectual.

What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.

The more intense a spiritual leader’s appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.