Emil Cioran - Fear Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

View all Emil Cioran Quotes
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.

Emil Cioran
Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.

Emil Cioran
Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?

Emil Cioran
This world was created from God's fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator. Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we live dramas for the boredom of a spectator, whose claps have never reached the ears of a mortal.

Emil Cioran
The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion, when the intuition of disaster is so painful that it almost provokes a greater madness.... One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.

Emil Cioran
The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

Emil Cioran
Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.

Emil Cioran
Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself.

Emil Cioran
Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world.

Emil Cioran
Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.

Emil Cioran
In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future.

Emil Cioran
We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good—have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us. What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world. … And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.

Emil Cioran
The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.

Emil Cioran
Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.

Emil Cioran
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.

Emil Cioran
That fear which gives birth to thoughts, and the fear of thoughts…

Emil Cioran
A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of his talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.

Emil Cioran