Emil Cioran Quotes

#1. Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy!

Emil Cioran

#2. Only false values prevail, because everyone can assimilate them, counterfeit them (false thereby to the second degree). An idea that succeeds is necessarily a pseudo-idea.

Emil Cioran

#3. Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?

Emil Cioran

#4. At this very moment, I am suffering - as we say in French, j'ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.

Emil Cioran

#5. Between the demand to be clear,and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect.

Emil Cioran

#6. To have committed every crime but that of being a father.

Emil Cioran

#7. What is an argument for the defense that neither torments nor troubles - what is a eulogy that fails to kill? Every apology should be a murder by enthusiasm.

Emil Cioran

#8. Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone.

Emil Cioran

#9. When the habit of seeing things as they are turns into a mania, we lament the madman we have been and are no longer.

Emil Cioran

#10. I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside.

Emil Cioran

#11. Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.

Emil Cioran

#12. Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy.

Emil Cioran

#13. Nothing more to pursue, except the pursuit of nothing.

Emil Cioran

#14. The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.

Emil Cioran

#15. The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion ... one would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.

Emil Cioran

#16. The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It's not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.

Emil Cioran

#17. If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.

Emil Cioran

#18. How I wish I didn't know anything about myself and this world!

Emil Cioran

#19. I have always struggled, with the sole intention of ceasing to struggle. Result: zero.

Emil Cioran

#20. One should live and die where one was born ... I've been bored everywhere I went. What was the point of leaving Coasta Boacu?

Emil Cioran

#21. I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.

Emil Cioran

#22. Our only choice is between irrespirable truths and salutary frauds.

Emil Cioran

#23. This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this, and I do not. Everything is unique - and insignificant.

Emil Cioran

#24. I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.

Emil Cioran

#25. The idea of the Eternal Return can be fully grasped only by a man endowed with several chronic, hence recurrent infirmities, and who thus has the advantage of proceeding from relapse to relapse, with all that this implies as philosophic reflexion.

Emil Cioran

#26. Nothing desiccates a mind so much as its repugnance to conceive obscure ideas.

Emil Cioran

#27. A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people.

Emil Cioran

#28. I have never had a goal, I have sought out no result. I think that there cannot be, in general just as well as for ourselves, neither goal nor result. Everything isn't without meaning - the word slightly puts me off- but without necessity.

Emil Cioran

#29. I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide ...

Emil Cioran

#30. Bluntly: my rebellion is a faith to which I subscribe without believing in it.

Emil Cioran

#31. You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.

Emil Cioran

#32. 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

#33. Everything that lives makes noise. What an argument for the mineral kingdom!

Emil Cioran

#34. He detested objective truths, the burden of argument, sustained reasoning. He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one. Others are a dialectician's invention.

Emil Cioran

#35. Everyone has had, at a given moment, an extraordinary experience which will be for him, because of the memory of it he preserves, the crucial obstacle to his inner metamorphosis.

Emil Cioran

#36. We are ourselves only by the sum of our failures.

Emil Cioran

#37. The only successful philosophies and religions are the ones that flatter us, whether in the name of progress or of hell. Damned or not, man experiences an absolute need to be at the heart of everything.

Emil Cioran

#38. I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.

Emil Cioran

#39. I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.

Emil Cioran

#40. Essentially, boredom is centered upon time, on the horror of time, on the fear of time, the disclosure of time, the awareness of time. Those who are not aware of time passing do not get bored. It's not the time that passes, it's the time that doesn't pass.

Emil Cioran

#41. His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.

Emil Cioran

#42. Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.

Emil Cioran

#43. I am for the most part so convinced that everything is lacking in basis, consequence, justification, that if someone dared to contradict me, even the man I most admire, he would seem to me a charlatan or a fool.

Emil Cioran

#44. The real, the unique misfortune: to see the light of day. A disaster which dates back to aggressiveness, to the seed of expansion and rage within origins, to the tendency to the worst which first shook them up.

Emil Cioran

#45. In flawed families, a scion appears who dedicates himself to the truth and who ruins himself in its pursuit.

Emil Cioran

#46. After each night we are emptier: our mysteries and our griefs have leaked away into our dreams. Thus sleep's labor not only diminishes the power of our thought, but even that of our secrets.

Emil Cioran

#47. 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

#48. -To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously.

Emil Cioran

#49. The mystics and their "collected works." When one addresses oneself to God, and to God alone, as they claim to do, one should be careful not to write. God doesn't read ...

Emil Cioran

#50. The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity ...

Emil Cioran

#51. Only the mediocre want to die of old age. Suffer, then, drink pleasure to its last dregs, cry or laugh, scream in despair or with joy, sing about death or love, for nothing will endure! Morality can only make life a long series of missed opportunities.

Emil Cioran

#52. In a world without melancholy, nightingales would start burping

Emil Cioran

#53. A conscious fruit fly would have to confront exactly the same difficulties, the same kind of insoluble problems as man.

Emil Cioran

#54. The lot of the man who has rebelled too much is to have no energy left except for disappointment.

Emil Cioran

#55. There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.

Emil Cioran

#56. An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.

Emil Cioran

#57. The contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.

Emil Cioran

#58. Agression is a trait common to men and new gods.

Emil Cioran

#59. 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.

Emil Cioran

#60. Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' - That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

Emil Cioran

#61. We had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy.

Emil Cioran

#62. It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.

Emil Cioran

#63. As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.

Emil Cioran

#64. Without the idea of suicide I would have surely killed myself.

Emil Cioran

#65. Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.

Emil Cioran

#66. It is my prejudice against everything that turns out well that has given me a taste for reading history.

Emil Cioran

#67. True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.

Emil Cioran

#68. We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.

Emil Cioran

#69. We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

Emil Cioran

#70. Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it, this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What do do? where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.

Emil Cioran

#71. Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded a complete failure.

Emil Cioran

#72. Even when they desert hell, men do so only to reconstruct it elsewhere.

Emil Cioran

#73. For a long time - always, in fact - I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn't able to deal with it; for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.

Emil Cioran

#74. Every phenomenon is a corrupt version of another, larger
phenomenon: time, a disease of eternity; history, a disease of
time; life, again, a disease of matter.
Then what is normal, what is healthy? Eternity? Which itself
is only an infirmity of God.

Emil Cioran

#75. Nero would be long since forgotten without his outbursts of bloody clowning. ~ Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

Emil Cioran

#76. Solitude: so fulfilling that the merest rendezvous is a crucifixion.

Emil Cioran

#77. We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.

Emil Cioran

#78. For the normal man, life is an undisputed reality; only the sick man is delighted by life and praises it so that he won't collapse.

Emil Cioran

#79. 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

#80. We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.

Emil Cioran

#81. The more power man acquires, the more vulnerable he becomes. What he must fear most is the moment when, creation entirely fleeced, he will celebrate his triumph, that fatal apotheosis, the victory he will not survive.

Emil Cioran

#82. The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know where that elsewhere is.

Emil Cioran

#83. What do you do from morning to night?"
"I endure myself.

Emil Cioran

#84. Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

Emil Cioran

#85. Nothing is better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.

Emil Cioran

#86. 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

#87. No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

Emil Cioran

#88. I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?

Emil Cioran

#89. Each opinion, each view is necessarily partial, truncated, inadequate. In philosophy and in anything, originality comes down to incomplete definitions.

Emil Cioran

#90. To accomplish nothing and die of the strain

Emil Cioran

#91. Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.

Emil Cioran

#92. Extraordinary and null - these two adjectives apply to the sexual act, and, consequently, to everything resulting from it, to life first of all.

Emil Cioran

#93. I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if, creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity. Yet in a less assured mood, birth seems a calamity I would be miserable not having known.

Emil Cioran

#94. By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

Emil Cioran

#95. Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself.

Emil Cioran

#96. Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are.

Emil Cioran

#97. It takes an enormous humility to die. The strange thing is that everyone turns out to have it!

Emil Cioran

#98. Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.

Emil Cioran

#99. My vision of the future is so exact that if I had children, I should strangle them here and now.

Emil Cioran

#100. Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught.
Both theses are equally well-founded, hence equally true, as each of us can discover for himself in the space of an hour, sometimes of a minute. ...

Emil Cioran