374 Quotes by Emile M. Cioran

Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.

What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?

I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen--and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies.

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

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

When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, “What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act.” And they do calm down.

Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught.

Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.

Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.