Emile M. Cioran

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.

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

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

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.

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

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

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

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?

Anyone can escape into sleep we are all geniuses when we dream the butcher's the poet's equal there.

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.

In every man sleeps a prophet and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

Philosophers write for professors, thinkers for writers.

We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.

Man starts over again everyday in spite of all he knows against all he knows.

I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.