504 Quotes by Emil Cioran

A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.

Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor and revolt, a perplexity on fire.

The amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its profundity.

Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.

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

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.

To have committed every crime but that of being a father.

History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.

I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass – which is better than trying to fill them.