Nothing is so wearing as the ...

Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.
Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.
 Emile M. Cioran

More phrases

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.
I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.
 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.
The amount of happiness that you have depends on the amount of freedom you have in your heart.
 Thích Nhất Hạnh
Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom - and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech.

Quotes from the same author

The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?
 Emile M. Cioran
Nothing sweeter than to drag oneself along behind events; and nothing more reasonable. But without a strong dose of madness, no initiative, no enterprise, no gesture. Reason: the rust of our vitality. It is the madman in us who forces us to adventure; once he abandons us, we are lost; everything depends on him, even our vegetative life; it is he who invites us, who obliges us to breathe, and it is also he who forces our blood to venture through our veins. Once he withdraws, we are alone indeed! We cannot be normal and alive at the same time.
 Emile M. Cioran
The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable.
 Emile M. Cioran
By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?
 Emile M. Cioran
The curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing now but mask and ghost.
 Emile M. Cioran