Emil Cioran Quotes

To achieve important things, we have to sacrifice what's important to us. That's an idea that's very central to Indian thinking.

With every interview you feel like you lose a piece of yourself, and with every bad review you become just that little bit more bitter. It is horrible in a way.

I'll keep peace at all cost, even if I choke to death on my tongue.

I have sacrificed everything in my life that I consider precious to advance the political career of my husband.

I think that I have sold out sometimes.

A lot of people, some of them close to me as well, have said that I sacrificed myself by doing what I did in bringing Terry on board. I didn't see it that way.

We [communists] took the noblest dreams and hopes of mankind as our credo; the evil that we did was to accept the degradation of our own souls.

If I fought like I was looking for a place in history, it would ruin me as a person. I don't think history is worth selling my soul.

For the sake of calm in the country, I am ready to sacrifice my own sanity.

This industry will shape you and mold you, and if you're willing to compromise yourself and let yourself change too much, then you're not really gonna know you are anymore.

Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven't even got a self to express.

Balance the cost of the soul you lost with the dreams you lightly sold.

Shall I, to please another wine-sprung minde, Lose all mine own? God hath giv'n me a measure Short of His can and body; must I find A pain in that, wherein he finds a pleasure?

.. every step of the upward way is strewn with wreckage of body, mind, and morals.

Anything that forces you to act at the possible harm of your own existence is going to exact a cost. You have to then think about, "Can I pay this? What will this mean to me - to my relationships, to my family, to everybody? What is this going to take? How much of me is this going to take?"

The most exhausting effort in my life has been to suppress my own nature in order to make it serve my biggest plans.

To live in any true sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must be able to renounce, to do oneself violence, to act against one's own nature, to weaken oneself; we conceive freedom only for ourselves - we extend it to our neighbours only at the cost of exhausting efforts; whence the precariousness of liberalism, a defiance of our instincts, a brief and miraculous success, a state of exception, at the antipodes of our deepest imperatives.

To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?

Compromise is said to be the way of the world and yet I find myself feeling sick trying to accept what it has done to me.

Even ministers of good things are like torches, a light to others, waste and destruction to themselves.

The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left.

Which would prove I'm a monster, Arnie? Sacrificing the people I love for the fight? Or walking away from the fight to save the people i love?

You can't be free if the cost of being you is too high.

I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective equality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur.

But what if you discover that the price of purpose is to render invisible so many other things?