374 Quotes by Emile M. Cioran

If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.

Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.

My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission.

Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.

When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique - and insignificant.

A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.

How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.