If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Self-image]

Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with our kind: the more we practice it, the more we become like everyone else: it is in the performance of a reputedly bestial function that we prove our status as citizens: nothing is more public than the sexual act.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Sex]

We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Socializing and Socialism]

Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Solitude]

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Speech]

It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Suicide]

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Suicide]

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Torture]

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
~ E. M. Cioran - [Tragedies]

We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Vitality]

Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist --a demonic, elemental, bestial pessimist --only when life has been defeated many times in its fight against depression.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Pessimism]

Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Procreation]

Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Reason]

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.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Rejection]

When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Salvation]

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland --and no other.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Language]

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Martyrdom]

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.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Martyrdom]

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Meaning of Life]

The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Mind]