Emil M. Cioran Quotes

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

~ Emil M. Cioran

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.

~ Emil M. Cioran

Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.

~ Emil M. Cioran

To live entirely without a goal! I have glimpsed this state, and have often attained it, without managing to remain there: I am too weak for such happiness.

~ Emil M. Cioran

I try--without success--to stop finding reasons for vanity in anything. When I happen to manage it nonetheless, I feel that I no longer belong to the mortal gang. I am above everything then, above the gods themselves. Perhaps that is what death is: a sensation of great, of extreme superiority.

~ Emil M. Cioran

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

~ Emil M. Cioran

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 M. Cioran

To live in any true sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must be able to renounce, to do oneself violence, to act against one's own nature, to weaken oneself; we conceive freedom only for ourselves - we extend it to our neighbours only at the cost of exhausting efforts; whence the precariousness of liberalism, a defiance of our instincts, a brief and miraculous success, a state of exception, at the antipodes of our deepest imperatives.

~ Emil M. Cioran

In numele si sub teroarea ei (plictiselii, n.m.) parasesc oamenii caminul si moartea agreabila legata de el si se avanta in lume, spre a muri undeva fara acoperis si fara lacrimi; adolescentii se gandesc la sinucideri in zile infinite de primavara, iar servitoarele fara amanti se lamenteaza duminicile, de parca inima lor e un cimitir in care mortii nu pot dormi.

~ Emil M. Cioran

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live-moreover, the only one.

~ Emil M. Cioran

Tristetea, ca si suferinta, ne revela existenta, deoarece în ele avem în constiinta separatia noastra de lumea obiectiva si nelinistea care da un caracter tragic vietuirii în existenta.Daca ar exista un zeu al tristetii, lui nu i-ar putea creste decât aripi negre si grele, pentru a zbura nu înspre ceruri, ci în infern.

~ Emil M. Cioran

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 M. Cioran

I hate wise men because they are lazy, cowardly, and prudent. To the philosophers' equanimity, which makes them indifferent to both pleasure and pain, I prefer devouring passions. The sage knows neither the tragedy of passion, nor the fear of death, nor risk and enthusiasm, nor barbaric, grotesque, or sublime heroism. He talks in proverbs and gives advice. He does not live, feel, desire, wait for anything. He levels down all the incongruities of life and then suffers the consequences. So much more complex is the man who suffers from limitless anxiety. The wise man's life is empty and sterile, for it is free from contradiction and despair. An existence full of irreconcilable contradictions is so much richer and creative. The wise man's resignation springs from inner void, not inner fire. I would rather die of fire than of void.

~ Emil M. Cioran

Il ne fait aucun doute pour moi que la sagesse est le but principal de la vie et c'est pourquoi je reviens toujours aux stoïciens. Ils ont atteint la sagesse, on ne peut donc plus les appeler des philosophes au sens propre du terme. De mon point de vue, la sagesse est le terme naturel de la philosophie, sa fin dans les deux sens du mot. Une philosophie finit en sagesse et par là même disparaît.

~ Emil M. Cioran

A book is a suicide postponed.

~ Emil M. Cioran

It is no sign of benediction to have been obsessed with the lives of saints, for it is an obsession intertwined with a taste for maladies and hunger for depravities. One only troubles oneself with saints because one has been disappointed by the paradoxes of earthly life; one therefore searches out other paradoxes, more outlandish in guise, redolent of unknown truths, unknown perfumes...

~ Emil M. Cioran

Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.

~ Emil M. Cioran

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

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

~ Emil M. Cioran

Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.

~ Emil M. Cioran

There are people who are destined to taste only the poison in things, for whom any surprise is a painful surprise and any experience a new occasion for torture. if someone were to say to me that such suffering has subjective reasons, related to the individual's particular makeup, i would then ask; is there an objective criterion for evaluating suffering? who can say with precision that my neighbor suffers more than i do or that jesus suffered more than all of us? there is no objective standard because suffering cannot be measured according to the external stimulation or local irritation of the organism, but only as it is felt and reflected in consciousness. alas, from this point of view, any hierarchy is out of the question. each person remains with his own suffering, which he believes absolute and unlimited. how much would we diminish our own personal suffering if we were to compare it to all the world's sufferings until now, to the most horrifying agonies and the most complicated tortures, the mostcruel deaths and the most painful betrayals, all the lepers, all those burned alive or starved to death? nobody is comforted in his sufferings by the thought that we are all mortals, nor does anybody who suffers really find comfort in the past or present suffering of others. because in this organically insufficient and fragmentary world, the individual is set to live fully, wishing to make of his own existence an absolute.

~ Emil M. Cioran

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

~ Emil M. Cioran

We breathe too fast to be able to grasp things in themselves or to expose their fragility. Our panting postulates and distorts them, creates and disfigures them, and binds us to them. I bestir myself, therefore I emit a world as suspect as my speculation which justifies it; I espouse movement, which changes me into a generator of being, into an artisan of fictions, while my cosmogonic verve makes me forget that, led on by the whirlwind of acts, I am nothing but an acolyte of time, an agent of decrepit universes. (...)If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

~ Emil M. Cioran

If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing it.Becoming: an agony without an ending.The older I grow, the less I enjoy performing my little Hamlet. The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death. If History had a goal, how lamentable would be the fate of those of us who have accomplished nothing!On the frontiers of the self: ‘What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I’. Events - tumours of time.Man secretes disaster.The secret of my adaptation to life? - I’ve changed despairs the way I’ve changed shirts. Each day is a Rubicon in which I aspire to be drowned.

~ Emil M. Cioran

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 M. Cioran

I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.

~ Emil M. Cioran

The sense that everything is going wrong has existed in every era, and rightly so since men have found no greater pleasure than in inventing new ways to make each other miserable.

~ Emil M. Cioran

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

~ Emil M. Cioran

We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job...

~ Emil M. Cioran

But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle. . .

~ Emil M. Cioran

It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

~ Emil M. Cioran

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

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 M. Cioran

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

~ Emil M. Cioran

How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.

~ Emil M. Cioran

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

~ Emil M. Cioran

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.

~ Emil M. Cioran

That there should be a reality hidden behind appearances is, after all, quite possible; that language might render such a thing would be an absurd hope.

~ Emil M. Cioran

Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?

~ Emil M. Cioran

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 M. Cioran