Top 100 Emil Cioran Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

#2. I'm very drawn to Eastern Europe, so I like a Hungarian writer who wrote in French called Emil Cioran; he was always good for giving me such a stir.

Dylan Moran

#3. I've never practiced a profession and have lived like a sort of student. I consider this my greatest success, my life hasn't been a failure because I succeeded in doing nothing.

Emil Cioran

#4. What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?

Emil Cioran

#5. As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.

Emil Cioran

#6. Any and all water is the color of drowning.

Emil M. Cioran

#7. 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

#8. When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

#10. You kill yourself only if, in some respects, you have always been outside of it all.

Emil Cioran

#11. I have all the defects of other people and yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.

Emil Cioran

#12. Shyness, inexhaustible source of misfortunes in practical life, is the direct cause, indeed unique, each inner wealth.

Emil Cioran

#13. The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life.

Emil M. Cioran

#14. Only god has the privilege of abandoning us. Men can only drop us

Emil M. Cioran

#15. Death is the solidest thing life has invented so far

Emil Cioran

#16. 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

#17. Torn between violence and disillusionment, I seem to myself a terrorist who, going out in the street to perpetrate some outrage, stops on the way to consult Ecclesiastes or Epictetus.

Emil Cioran

#18. The dead center of existence: when it is all the same to you whether you read a newspaper article or think about God.

Emil Cioran

#19. 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

#20. I have recommended you the dignity of skepticism: yet here I am, prowling around the Absolute. Technique of contradiction? Remember, rather, what Flaubert said: "I am a mystic and I believe in nothing".

Emil Cioran

#21. But man is a strayed animal, and when he falls victim to doubt, if he should happen to take no further pleasure in attacking others, he turns on himself in order to inflict merciless tortures.

Emil Cioran

#22. 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

#23. The Real gives me asthma.

Emil M. Cioran

#24. We are all deep in a hell, each of which is a miracle.

Emil Cioran

#25. If we consider closely our so-called generous actions, there is none which, from some aspect, is not blameworthy an even harmful, so that we come to regret having performed it - so that we must choose, finally, between abstention and remorse.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. Ambition is a drug that turns it's addicts into potential madmen.

Emil Cioran

#31. 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

#32. The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

Emil Cioran

#33. 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

#34. Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.

Emil Cioran

#35. To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing.

Emil Cioran

#36. It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say "we" with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke "others" and regard himself as their interpreter - for me to consider him my enemy.

Emil Cioran

#37. If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.

Emil Cioran

#38. We must learn how to explode! Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage.

Emil Cioran

#39. 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

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

Emil Cioran

#41. For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened. ...
No sooner are they open than the drama beings. To look without understanding - that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much. ...

Emil Cioran

#42. Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.

Emil Cioran

#43. Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.

Emil Cioran

#44. Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do. One so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it.

Emil Cioran

#45. Call it insensitivity or a passion for remorse, I have never undertaken to rescue what little Absolute this world contains.

Emil M. Cioran

#46. Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.

Emil Cioran

#47. How does it happen that in life as in literature, rebellion, however pure, has something false about it, whereas resignation, however tainted with listlessness, always gives the impression of authenticity

Emil Cioran

#48. All knowledge pushed to its limit can be dangerous, and morbid, because life is endurable solely because we don't see it through to the end. An undertaking is only possible if we have conserved a minimum of illusions. Complete lucidity is the void!

Emil Cioran

#49. 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

#50. In Buddhist writings, mention is often made of "the abyss of birth." An abyss indeed, a gulf into which we do not fall but from which, instead, we emerge, to our universal chagrin.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

#52. Frivolous, disconnected, an amateur at everything, I shall have known thoroughly only the disadvantage of having been born.

Emil M. Cioran

#53. To be objective is to treat others as you treat an object, a corpse - to behave with them like an undertaker.

Emil Cioran

#54. Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

#57. It has been a long time since philosophers have read men's souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.

Emil Cioran

#58. 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

#59. I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.

Emil Cioran

#60. 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

#61. Characteristic of sickness to stay awake when everything sleeps, when everything is at rest, even the sick man.

Emil Cioran

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. What they ask you for is actions, proofs, works, and all you can produce are transformed tears.

Emil Cioran

#66. There are people to whom gain is unimportant, who are hopelessly unhappy and lonely.

Emil Cioran

#67. Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on.
Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

#70. 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

#71. Unmaking, decreating, is the only task man may take upon himself, if he aspires, as everything suggests, to distinguish himself from the Creator.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

#74. Doubt works deep within you like a disease or, even more effectively, like a faith.

Emil Cioran

#75. 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

#76. Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.

Emil M. Cioran

#77. If attachment is an evil, we must look for its cause in the scandal of birth, for to be born is to be attached. Detachment then should apply itself to getting rid of the traces of this scandal, the most serious and intolerable.

Emil Cioran

#78. What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.

Emil Cioran

#79. A book is a suicide postponed.

Emil M. Cioran

#80. 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

#81. Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.

Emil Cioran

#82. Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist - a demonic, elemental, bestial pessimist - only when life has been defeated many times in its fight against depression.

Emil Cioran

#83. It is easier to get on with vices than with virtues. The vices, accommodating by nature, help each other, are full of mutual indulgence, whereas the jealous virtues combat and annihilate each other, showing in everything their incompatibility and their intolerence

Emil Cioran

#84. If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.

Emil Cioran

#85. 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

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

Emil Cioran

#87. 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

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

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

#90. 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

#91. Memories vanish when we want to remember, but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget.

Emil Cioran

#92. To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression.
I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.

Emil Cioran

#93. Tolerance cannot seduce the young.

Emil M. Cioran

#94. 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

#95. Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.

Emil Cioran