Emil Cioran Quotes

488 Sourced Quotes

It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should avoid simulacra and even realities; you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a solitary elephant.

Emil Cioran
The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

Emil Cioran
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.

Emil Cioran
What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!

Emil Cioran
What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!

Emil Cioran
Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.

Emil Cioran
Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.

Emil Cioran
In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.

Emil Cioran
Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.

Emil Cioran
Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?

Emil Cioran
We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

Emil Cioran
God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.

Emil Cioran
To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously.

Emil Cioran
We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.

Emil Cioran
To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.

Emil Cioran
In order to conceive, and to steep ourselves in, unreality, we must have it constantly present to our minds. The day we feel it, see it, everything becomes unreal, except that unreality which alone makes existence tolerable.

Emil 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 Cioran
It is easier to get on with vices than with virtues. The vices, accommodating by nature, help each other, are full of mutual indulgence, whereas the jealous virtues combat and annihilate each other, showing in everything their incompatibility and their intolerance.

Emil Cioran
To dream of an enterprise of demolition that would spare none of the traces of the original Big Bang.

Emil Cioran
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

Emil Cioran
Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.

Emil Cioran
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.

Emil Cioran
To think is to run after insecurity, to be demoralized for grandiose trifles, to immure oneself in abstractions with a martyr's avidity, to hunt up complications the way others pursue collapse or gain. The thinker is by definition keen for torment.

Emil Cioran
A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It's not easy to be on the wrong foot with life

Emil Cioran
That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.

Emil Cioran
I don't need any support, advice, or compassion, because even if I am the most ruinous man, I still feel so powerful, so strong and fierce. For I am the only one that lives without hope.

Emil Cioran
The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to form a reality to reality's detriment.

Emil Cioran
Even in childhood I watched the hours flow, independent of any reference, any action, any event, the disjunction of time from what was not itself, its autonomous existence, its special status, its empire, its tyranny. I remember quite clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts. Time was coming unstuck from being—at my expense.

Emil Cioran
To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.

Emil Cioran
To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

Emil Cioran