Quote

An individual dies ... when, instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being, he cowers within, and takes refuge there.

Emile M. Cioran

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Emile M. Cioran
Within
Hurling
Dies
Refuge
Individual
Risks
Toward
Taking
Instead
Risk
Takes

More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

Image
If you lack the power to demoralize yourself along with the age, to go as low and as far, do not complain of being misunderstood by it.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
To think is to take a cunning revenge in which we camouflage our baseness and conceal our lower instincts.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
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
Image
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
The amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its profundity.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
There is no limit to suffering.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
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 more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
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
Image
One does not inhabit a country one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
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
Image
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
Emile M. Cioran