Quote

Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.

Emile M. Cioran

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Emile M. Cioran
Men
Guarantees
Tragic
Exercise
Alone
Possible
Duration
Freedom
Guarantee
Cannot
Mediocre
Make
Paradox

More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

Image
I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
The Art of Love: knowing how to combine the temperament of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Everything is pathology, except for indifference.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
Emile M. Cioran
Image
We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent -unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it -we perpetuate it within ourselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion... One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?
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
Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
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
Image
Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.
Emile M. Cioran