Emile M. Cioran Long Quotations

So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.

Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.

One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.

If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.

It has been a long time since philosophers have read men's souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.