Top 56 Emil M. Cioran Quotes
#2. I had gone far in search of the sun, and the sun, found at last, was hostile to me. And if I were to fling myself off a cliff? While I was making such rather grim speculations, considering these pines, these rocks, these waves, I suddenly felt how bound I was to this lovely, accursed universe.
Emil M. Cioran
#3. The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life.
Emil M. Cioran
#4. Only god has the privilege of abandoning us. Men can only drop us
Emil M. Cioran
#6. If only we could reach back before the concept, could write on a level with the senses, record the infinitesimal variations of what we touch, do what a reptile would do if it were to set about writing!
Emil M. Cioran
#7. A free man is one who has discerned the inanity of all points of view; a liberated man is one who has drawn the consequences of such discernment.
Emil M. Cioran
#8. Call it insensitivity or a passion for remorse, I have never undertaken to rescue what little Absolute this world contains.
Emil M. Cioran
#9. Frivolous, disconnected, an amateur at everything, I shall have known thoroughly only the disadvantage of having been born.
Emil M. Cioran
#10. Nature's great mistake was to have been unable to confine herself to one "kingdom": juxtaposed with the vegetable, everything else seems inopportune, out of place. The sun should have sulked at the appearance of the first insect, and gone out altogether with the advent of the chimpanzee.
Emil M. Cioran
#11. A remark of my brother's apropos of the troubles and pains our mother endured: "Old age is nature's self-criticism.
Emil M. Cioran
#12. During the long nights in the caves, how many Hamlets must have murmured their endless monologues - for it is likely that the apogee of metaphysical torment is to be located well before that universal insipidity which followed the advent of Philosophy.
Emil M. Cioran
#15. After a sleepless night, the people in the street seem automatons. No one seems to breathe, to walk, Each looks as if he is worked by clockwork: nothing spontaneous; mechanical smiles, spectral gesticulations. Yourself a specter, how would you see others as alive?
Emil M. Cioran
#17. My greed for agonies has made me die so many times that it strikes me as indecent to keep on abusing a corpse from which I can get nothing more.
Emil M. Cioran
#18. Once I had a "self"; now I am no more than an object.
Emil M. Cioran
#19. Beatitude through suffering is an illusion, since it requires a reconciliation to the fatality of pain in order to avoid total annihilation.
Emil M. Cioran
#20. The more we frequent men, the blacker our thoughts; and when, to clarify them, we return to our solitude, we find there the shadow they have cast.
Emil M. Cioran
#22. The best of myself, that point of light which distances me from everything, I owe to my infrequent encounters with a few bitter fools, a few disconsolate bastards, who, victims of the rigor of their cynicism, could no longer attach themselves to any vice.
Emil M. Cioran
#23. A little more fervor in my nihilism and I might - gainsaying everything - shake off my doubts and triumph over them. But I have only the taste of negation, not its grace.
Emil M. Cioran
#24. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life.
Emil M. Cioran
#25. Enlightened despotism: the only regime that can attract a disabused mind, one incapable of being the accomplice of revolutions since it is not even the accomplice of history.
Emil M. Cioran
#26. The cynicism of utter solitude is a calvary relieved by insolence.
Emil M. Cioran
#27. You with your veins full of night - you have no more place among men than an epitaph in the middle of a circus.
Emil M. Cioran
#28. Ever since I was born" - that since has a resonance so dreadful to my ears it becomes unendurable.
Emil M. Cioran
#30. The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to a form of reality to reality's detriment.
Emil M. Cioran
#33. Mystery - a word we use to deceive others, to convince them we are "deeper" than they are.
Emil M. Cioran
#34. To dissect a poem as if it were a system is a crime, even a sacrilege.
Emil M. Cioran
#35. If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?
Emil M. Cioran
#36. Compassion is a sign of superficiality: broken destinies and unrelenting misery either make you scream or turn you to stone.
Emil M. Cioran
#37. Our power resides in our incapacity to know how alone we are.
Emil M. Cioran
#40. The mission of Everyman is to fulfill the lies he incarnates, to succeed in being no more than an exhaust illusion.
Emil M. Cioran
#41. My disappointments, instead of converging toward a center and constituting if not a system at least an ensemble, are scattered, each supposed itself unique and thereby wasted, lacking organization.
Emil M. Cioran
#42. Stoicism for show: to be an enthusiast of nil admirari, an hysteric of ataraxia.
Emil M. Cioran
#43. I have no ideas, only obsessions. Anybody can have ideas. Ideas have never caused anybody's downfall.
Emil M. Cioran
#45. The human being delivered to himself, without any partiality for elegance, is a monster.
Emil M. Cioran
#46. The terrifying experience and obsession of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of yourself. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness.
Emil M. Cioran
#47. I don't need any support, encouragement, or consolation because, although I am the lowest of men, I feel nonetheless so strong, so hard, so savage! For I am the only man who lives with- out hope, the apex of heroism and paradox.
Emil M. Cioran
#48. The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.
Emil M. Cioran
#49. Kill yourself because of what you are, yes, but not because all humanity would spit in your face!
Emil M. Cioran
#50. Born weary of being born, he chose to be a shade; when, then, did he live, and by the transgression of what birth? And if, living, he wore his shroud, by what miracle did he manage to die?
Emil M. Cioran
#51. As far back as I can remember, I've utterly destroyed within myself the pride of being human. And I saunter to the periphery of the Race like a timorous monster, lacking the energy to claim kinship with some other band of apes.
Emil M. Cioran
#52. If only we could return to those ages when no utterance shackled existence, to the laconism of interjections, to the joyous stupor of the pre- verbal!
Emil M. Cioran
#53. Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that he alone pursues the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear.
Emil M. Cioran
#54. Explosive force of any mortification. Every vanquished desire affords us power. We have the more hold over this world the further we withdraw from it, the less we adhere to it. Renunciation confers an infinite power.
Emil M. Cioran
#56. No one has lived so close to his skeleton as I have lived to mine: from which results an endless dialogue and certain truths which I manage neither to accept nor to reject.
Emil M. Cioran
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