Top 100 Emile M Cioran Quotes
#1. Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.
Emile M. Cioran
#2. Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
Emile M. Cioran
#3. A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
Emile M. Cioran
#4. Boredom dismantles the mind, renders it superficial, out at the seams, saps it from within and dislocates it.
Emile M. Cioran
#7. There is only one thing worse than boredom, and that is the fear of boredom.
Emile M. Cioran
#8. Transmitting one's flaws [through procreation] to someone else is a crime. I could never consent to give life to someone who would inherent my ailments.
Emile M. Cioran
#9. You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.
Emile M. Cioran
#10. A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.
Emile M. Cioran
#11. Man started out on the wrong foot. The misadventure in paradise was the first consequence. The rest had to follow.
Emile M. Cioran
#14. The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.
Emile M. Cioran
#15. My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission.
Emile M. Cioran
#16. Maniacs of Procreation, bipeds with devalued faces, we have lost all appeal for each other.
Emile M. Cioran
#17. If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: "I want to be praised."
Emile M. Cioran
#18. One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.
Emile M. Cioran
#19. Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.
Emile M. Cioran
#20. In most cases we attach ourselves to in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify we can do without it, that we have found something better, and we also attach ourselves to God in horror of men.
Emile M. Cioran
#21. Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.
Emile M. Cioran
#22. Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
Emile M. Cioran
#23. "The Holy Ghost," Luther instructs us, "is not a skeptic." Not everyone can be, and that is really too bad.
Emile M. Cioran
#24. The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.
Emile M. Cioran
#25. By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.
Emile M. Cioran
#26. The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity ... Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does this whispering voice say? Everything in us that is not human anymore.
Emile M. Cioran
#27. So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.
Emile M. Cioran
#28. The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.
Emile M. Cioran
#30. Just as ecstasy purifies you of the particular and the contingent, leaving nothing except light and darkness, so insomnia kills off the multiplicity and diversity of the world, leaving you prey to your private obsessions.
Emile M. Cioran
#31. The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.
Emile M. Cioran
#33. Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret.
Emile M. Cioran
#34. Tyrants are always assassinated too late. That is their great excuse.
Emile M. Cioran
#35. If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame.
Emile M. Cioran
#36. Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
Emile M. Cioran
#37. Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.
Emile M. Cioran
#38. Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent -unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it -we perpetuate it within ourselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude.
Emile M. Cioran
#39. To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel you are consubstantial with that future.
Emile M. Cioran
#40. To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.
Emile M. Cioran
#42. What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.
Emile M. Cioran
#43. To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.
Emile M. Cioran
#44. Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.
Emile M. Cioran
#45. Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
Emile M. Cioran
#46. If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.
Emile M. Cioran
#47. We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.
Emile M. Cioran
#48. We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.
Emile M. Cioran
#51. Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.
Emile M. Cioran
#53. What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.
Emile M. Cioran
#54. What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
Emile M. Cioran
#55. I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away.
Emile M. Cioran
#56. A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.
Emile M. Cioran
#57. A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
Emile M. Cioran
#58. Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.
Emile M. Cioran
#59. Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other.
Emile M. Cioran
#60. Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself - there is no wish I make more often.
Emile M. Cioran
#61. I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.
Emile M. Cioran
#62. No one can keep his griefs in their prime; they use themselves up.
Emile M. Cioran
#64. Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.
Emile M. Cioran
#65. The Art of Love: knowing how to combine the temperament of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone.
Emile M. Cioran
#66. Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.
Emile M. Cioran
#67. We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
Emile M. Cioran
#68. To think is to take a cunning revenge in which we camouflage our baseness and conceal our lower instincts.
Emile M. Cioran
#69. God - a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
Emile M. Cioran
#70. When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.
Emile M. Cioran
#71. Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
Emile M. Cioran
#73. A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
Emile M. Cioran
#74. Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise.
Emile M. Cioran
#75. The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
Emile M. Cioran
#76. Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
Emile M. Cioran
#78. Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.
Emile M. Cioran
#79. Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.
Emile M. Cioran
#80. Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor and revolt, a perplexity on fire.
Emile M. Cioran
#81. A sensation must have fallen very low to deign to turn into an idea.
Emile M. Cioran
#82. All people see fires, storms, explosions, or landscapes; but how many feel the flames, the lightnings, the whirlwinds, or the harmony? How many have an inner beauty that tinges their melancholy?
Emile M. Cioran
#83. Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
Emile M. Cioran
#84. My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.
Emile M. Cioran
#85. The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. Why call him a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot.
Emile M. Cioran
#86. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.
Emile M. Cioran
#87. Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.
Emile M. Cioran
#88. To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell
Emile M. Cioran
#89. If you're unlucky enough not to have alcoholic parents, it takes you a whole lifetime of intoxication to overcome the dead weight of their virtues.
Emile M. Cioran
#90. 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
#91. On Creating - What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures.
Emile M. Cioran
#92. By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?
Emile M. Cioran
#93. A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It's not easy to be on the wrong foot with life
Emile M. Cioran
#94. What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.
Emile M. Cioran
#95. Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.
Emile M. Cioran
#96. I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.
Emile M. Cioran
#97. What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.
Emile M. Cioran
#98. If you lack the power to demoralize yourself along with the age, to go as low and as far, do not complain of being misunderstood by it.
Emile M. Cioran
#99. For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
Emile M. Cioran
#100. One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.
Emile M. Cioran
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