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A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
Begins
Civilization
Becomes
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Life
Decline
Sole
Obsession

More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

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A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
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Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
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It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false
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Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
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The Holy Ghost, Luther instructs us, is not a skeptic. Not everyone can be, and that is really too bad.
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What is pity but the vice of kindness.
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Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world.
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Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.
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What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
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We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.
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I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.
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Society: an inferno of saviors!
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The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.
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Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
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The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.
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The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.
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Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.
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Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.
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In most cases we attach ourselves to in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify we can do without it, that we have found something better, and we also attach ourselves to God in horror of men.
Emile M. Cioran
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By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?
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