Top 100 Quotes About Cioran
#1. I will quote Cioran (who is not yet a classic but will become one): "While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning a tune on the flute. 'What good will it do you,' they asked, 'to know this tune before you die?
Italo Calvino
#2. Cioran, bureaucratic heart of the Empire. Or if not heart, kidney. Maybe small bowel.
James S.A. Corey
#3. Nero would be long since forgotten without his outbursts of bloody clowning. ~ Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay
Emil Cioran
#4. 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
#5. And if we're talking about hard-boiled detectives, too, what could be more hardboiled than the worldview of Ligotti or Cioran? They make the grittiest of crime writers seem like dilettantes. Next to The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Mickey Spillane seems about as hard-boiled as bubble gum.
Nic Pizzolatto
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?
Emil Cioran
#9. As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.
Emil Cioran
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy!
Emil Cioran
#14. Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
Emile M. Cioran
#15. It has been forever that people aspire towards liberty and rejoiced averytime they lost it. The mortals never loved with passion except those who handcuffed them . And whom they turn into myth? The executioners of their freedom
Cioran
#16. You kill yourself only if, in some respects, you have always been outside of it all.
Emil Cioran
#17. I have all the defects of other people and yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.
Emil Cioran
#18. Shyness, inexhaustible source of misfortunes in practical life, is the direct cause, indeed unique, each inner wealth.
Emil Cioran
#19. The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life.
Emil M. Cioran
#20. A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
Emile M. Cioran
#21. Boredom dismantles the mind, renders it superficial, out at the seams, saps it from within and dislocates it.
Emile M. Cioran
#22. Only god has the privilege of abandoning us. Men can only drop us
Emil M. Cioran
#23. Death is the solidest thing life has invented so far
Emil Cioran
#26. There is only one thing worse than boredom, and that is the fear of boredom.
Emile M. Cioran
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. Not knowing humiliation, you are ignorant of what it is to arrive at the last stage of yourself.
E M Cioran
#33. 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
#34. You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.
Emile M. Cioran
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. Man started out on the wrong foot. The misadventure in paradise was the first consequence. The rest had to follow.
Emile M. Cioran
#38. 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
#41. We are all deep in a hell, each of which is a miracle.
Emil Cioran
#42. 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
#44. Between the demand to be clear,and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect.
Emil Cioran
#45. To have committed every crime but that of being a father.
Emil Cioran
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission.
Emile M. Cioran
#50. Maniacs of Procreation, bipeds with devalued faces, we have lost all appeal for each other.
Emile M. Cioran
#51. 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
#52. Ambition is a drug that turns it's addicts into potential madmen.
Emil Cioran
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.
Emile M. Cioran
#57. Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.
Emil Cioran
#58. Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.
Emile M. Cioran
#59. To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing.
Emil Cioran
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
Emil Cioran
#63. 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
#64. Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
Emile M. Cioran
#65. We must learn how to explode! Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage.
Emil Cioran
#66. "The Holy Ghost," Luther instructs us, "is not a skeptic." Not everyone can be, and that is really too bad.
Emile M. Cioran
#67. 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
#68. The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.
Emile M. Cioran
#69. I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside.
Emil Cioran
#70. By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.
Emile M. Cioran
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.
Emile M. Cioran
#74. The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.
Emile M. Cioran
#75. Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.
Emil Cioran
#77. Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.
Emil Cioran
#78. 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
#79. Call it insensitivity or a passion for remorse, I have never undertaken to rescue what little Absolute this world contains.
Emil M. Cioran
#80. Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.
Emil Cioran
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret.
Emile M. Cioran
#88. Tyrants are always assassinated too late. That is their great excuse.
Emile M. Cioran
#89. 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
#90. Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy.
Emil Cioran
#91. Frivolous, disconnected, an amateur at everything, I shall have known thoroughly only the disadvantage of having been born.
Emil M. Cioran
#92. To be objective is to treat others as you treat an object, a corpse - to behave with them like an undertaker.
Emil Cioran
#93. 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
#94. Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
Emile M. Cioran
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Nothing more to pursue, except the pursuit of nothing.
Emil Cioran
#100. The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.
Emil Cioran
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