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
Individual
Risks
Toward
Taking
Instead
Risk
Takes
Within
Hurling
Dies
Refuge

More quotes by 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
The only free mind is one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Our first intuitions are the true ones.
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
Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Reality is a creation of our excesses.
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 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.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.
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