Emil Cioran - Mind Quotes

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The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so...

Emil Cioran
I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.

Emil Cioran
If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

Emil Cioran
Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?

Emil Cioran
The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?

Emil Cioran
In order to conceive, and to steep ourselves in, unreality, we must have it constantly present to our minds. The day we feel it, see it, everything becomes unreal, except that unreality which alone makes existence tolerable.

Emil Cioran
Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.

Emil Cioran
Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself — there is no wish I make more often.

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

Emil Cioran
The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.

Emil Cioran
It is unjust to call imaginary the diseases which are, on the contrary, only too real, since they proceed from our mind, the only regulator of our equilibrium and our health.

Emil Cioran
One disgust, then another - to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind... The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive.

Emil Cioran
Buddhism calls anger "corruption of the mind," Manicheism "root of the tree of death." I know this, but what good does it do me to know?

Emil Cioran
No one has the audacity to exclaim: I don't want to do anything! —we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions.

Emil Cioran
However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; - unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them... The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.

Emil Cioran
The only subversive mind is the one that questions the obligation to exist; all the others, the anarchist at the top of the list, compromise with the established order.

Emil Cioran
In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.

Emil Cioran
Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

Emil Cioran
One of the biggest paradoxes of our world: memories vanish when we want to remember, but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget.

Emil Cioran
The mind advances only when it has the patience to go in circles, in other words, to deepen.

Emil Cioran