374 Quotes by Emile M. Cioran

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.

I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside.

You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.

The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

Consider love: is there a nobler outpouring, a rapture less suspect? Its shudders rival music, compete with the tears of solitude and of ecstasy: sublime...but a sublimity inseperable from the urinary tract: transports bordering upon excretion, a heaven of the glands, sudden sancitity of the orifices. It takes no more than a moment of attention for this intoxication, shaken, to cast you back into the ordures of physiology or a moment of fatigue to recognize that so much ardor produces only a variety of mucous.

All that shimmers on the surface of the world, all that we call interesting, is the fruit of ignorance and inebriation.

I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.