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No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
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More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

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Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.
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To think is to take a cunning revenge in which we camouflage our baseness and conceal our lower instincts.
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The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
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The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.
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No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
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Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.
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We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
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Basis of society: anonymous sweat.
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Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself - there is no wish I make more often.
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We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.
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By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?
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There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
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I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.
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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.
Emile M. Cioran
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Once you see that everything is unreal, you can't see why you should bother to prove it.
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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.
Emile M. Cioran
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Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.
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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.
Emile M. Cioran
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Everything is pathology, except for indifference.
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Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
Emile M. Cioran