Emil Cioran Quotes

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For a long while I have lived with the notion that I was the most normal being that ever existed. This notion gave me the taste, even the passion for being unproductive: what was the use of being prized in a world inhabited by madmen, a world mired in mania and stupidity? For whom was one to bother, and to what end? It remains to be seen if I have quite freed myself from this certitude, salvation in the absolute, ruin in the immediate.

Emil Cioran
Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world.

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

Emil Cioran
Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!

Emil Cioran
We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

Emil Cioran
Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself.

Emil Cioran
Psychoanalysis will be entirely discredited one of these days, no doubt about it. Which will not keep it from destroying our last vestiges of naivete. After psychoanalysis, we can never again be innocent.

Emil Cioran
I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.

Emil Cioran
To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.

Emil Cioran
Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?

Emil Cioran
This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.

Emil Cioran
As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and aesthetic ideals? It's all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?

Emil Cioran
A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints.

Emil Cioran
I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action - mother of all vices - I am the cause of no one's suffering.

Emil Cioran
There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.

Emil Cioran
The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.

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

Emil Cioran
For a long time—always, in fact—I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn't able to deal with it; for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.

Emil Cioran
If there was a God of sorrow, he would grow black heavy wings, to soar not for the skies, but for inferno.

Emil Cioran
One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.

Emil Cioran
It makes no sense to say that death is the goal of life, but what else is there to say?

Emil Cioran
"I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside." This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works on introspection.

Emil Cioran
Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

Emil Cioran
In order to deceive melancholy, you must keep moving. Once you stop, it wakens, if in fact it has ever dozed off.

Emil Cioran
We regret not having the courage to make such and such decision; we regret much more having made one - any one. Better no action than the consequences of an action.

Emil Cioran
There exists, I grant you, a clinical depression, upon which certain remedies occasionally have effect; but there exists another kind, a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself.

Emil Cioran
There are questions which, once approached, either isolate you or kill you outright.

Emil Cioran
I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.

Emil Cioran
To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!

Emil Cioran
Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.

Emil Cioran