Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Emile M. Cioran
Power
Martyr
Human
Suffered
Persecutors
Humans
Appetite
Beheaded
Great
Beings
Recruited
Dangerous
Martyred
Quite
Diminishing
Belief
Martyrs
Suffering
Martyrdom

More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

Image
Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Wisdom disguises our wounds it teaches us how to bleed in secret.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
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
Image
To act is to anchor in the imminent future.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
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.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Every profound dissatisfaction is of a religious nature: our failures derive from our incapacity to conceive of paradise and to aspire to it, as our discomforts from the fragility of our relations with the absolute.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
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.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
The amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its profundity.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Thinking should be like musical meditation. Has any philosopher pursued a thought to its limits the way Bach or Beethoven develop and exhaust a musical theme? Even after having read the most profound thinkers, one still feels the need to begin anew. Only music gives definitive answers.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act. And they do calm down.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Under each formula lies a corpse.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety refuge among anemic ideas.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
Emile M. Cioran