Emil Cioran Quotes

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

Emil 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 Cioran
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.

Emil Cioran
It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

Emil Cioran
Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

Emil Cioran
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.

Emil Cioran
Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?

Emil 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 Cioran
We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.

Emil Cioran
He detested objective truths, the burden of argument, sustained reasoning. He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one. Others are a dialectician's invention.

Emil Cioran
I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.

Emil Cioran
Buddhism calls anger "corruption of the mind," Manicheism "root of the tree of death." I know this, but what good does it do me to know?

Emil Cioran
Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself.

Emil Cioran
If a man has not, by the time he is thirty, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned — a saint or a corpse.

Emil Cioran
"What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself."

Emil Cioran
We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

Emil Cioran
On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I."

Emil Cioran
What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!

Emil Cioran
Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again.

Emil Cioran
He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.

Emil Cioran
Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.

Emil Cioran
I long to be free—desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.

Emil Cioran
Haven't people learned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles?

Emil Cioran
A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse.

Emil Cioran
If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!

Emil Cioran