Emil Cioran Quotes

488 Sourced Quotes

We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die. - Didn't you know that's how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?

Emil Cioran
The flesh spreads, further and further, like a gangrene upon the surface of the globe. It cannot impose limits upon itself, it continues to be rife despite its rebuffs, it takes its defeats for conquests, it has never learned anything. It belongs above all to the realm of the Creator, and it is indeed in the flesh that He has projected His maleficent instincts.

Emil Cioran
The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.

Emil Cioran
Without will, no conflict: no tragedy among the abulic. Yet the failure of will can be experienced more painfully than a tragic destiny.

Emil Cioran
How I wish I didn't know anything about myself and this world!

Emil Cioran
Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.

Emil Cioran
Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?

Emil Cioran
Without the possibility of suicide, I would have killed myself long ago.

Emil Cioran
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?

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

Emil Cioran
Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth...

Emil Cioran
Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death!

Emil Cioran
If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?

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

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

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
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
In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.

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

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

Emil Cioran