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The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
History
Ideas
Men
Grudges
Grudge
Solitary

More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

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No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.
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To think is to take a cunning revenge in which we camouflage our baseness and conceal our lower instincts.
Emile M. Cioran
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Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
Emile M. Cioran
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Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.
Emile M. Cioran
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The universal view melts things into a blur.
Emile M. Cioran
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Everything turns on pain the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.
Emile M. Cioran
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Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart's drama and the negative meaning of history.
Emile M. Cioran
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the deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life.
Emile M. Cioran
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Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.
Emile M. Cioran
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Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.
Emile M. Cioran
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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
Emile M. Cioran
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Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?
Emile M. Cioran
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The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity… Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does this whispering voice say? Everything in us that is not human anymore.
Emile M. Cioran
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Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
Emile M. Cioran
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Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise.
Emile M. Cioran
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Humanity adores only those who cause it to perish.
Emile M. Cioran
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The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.
Emile M. Cioran
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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
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A sensation must have fallen very low to deign to turn into an idea.
Emile M. Cioran
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I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.
Emile M. Cioran