Emil Cioran Quotes

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

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

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

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
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
Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don't know, and we don't really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.

Emil Cioran
I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.

Emil Cioran
To make more plans than an explorer or a crook, yet to be infected at the will's very root.

Emil Cioran
Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught.

Emil Cioran
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

Emil Cioran
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

Emil Cioran
The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.

Emil Cioran
Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.

Emil Cioran
Nothing is indefensible - from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime.

Emil Cioran
Music is the sound track of askesis. Could one make love after Bach? Not even after Handel, whose unearthliness does not have heavenly perfume. Music is a tomb of delights, beatitude which buries us.

Emil Cioran
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
Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what's the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?

Emil Cioran
We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

Emil Cioran
When you love someone, you hope - the more closely to be attached - that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.

Emil Cioran
They ask you for facts, proofs, works, and all you can show them are transformed tears.

Emil Cioran
One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death's prisoner.

Emil Cioran
Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

Emil Cioran
Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.

Emil Cioran
Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence.

Emil Cioran
His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.

Emil Cioran
The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness.

Emil Cioran
I was walking late one night along a tree-lined path; a chestnut fell at my feet. The noise it made as it burst, the resonance it provoked in me, and an upheaval out of all proportion to this insignificant event thrust me into miracle, into the rapture of the definitive, as if there were no more questions—only answers. I was drunk on a thousand unexpected discoveries, none of which I could make use of. This is how I nearly reached the Supreme. But instead I went on with my walk.

Emil Cioran
To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire.

Emil Cioran
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

Emil Cioran