Emil Cioran Quotes

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

Emil Cioran
All morning, I did nothing but repeat: "Man is an abyss, man is an abyss." - I could not, alas, find anything better.

Emil Cioran
The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.

Emil Cioran
No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.

Emil Cioran
We always love... despite; and that "despite" covers an infinity.

Emil Cioran
The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?

Emil Cioran
The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It's not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.

Emil Cioran
It is not by genius, it is by suffering, and suffering alone, that one ceases to be a marionette.

Emil Cioran
The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion, when the intuition of disaster is so painful that it almost provokes a greater madness.... One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.

Emil Cioran
Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

Emil Cioran
If our fellow men could be aware of our opinions about them, love, friendship, and devotion would be forever erased from the dictionaries; and if we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an "I" without shame.

Emil Cioran
How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history—greater than the fall of empires—I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.

Emil Cioran
This world was created from God's fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator. Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we live dramas for the boredom of a spectator, whose claps have never reached the ears of a mortal.

Emil Cioran
Who does not believe in Fate proves that he has not lived.

Emil Cioran
Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.

Emil Cioran
By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?

Emil Cioran
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

Emil Cioran
Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?

Emil Cioran
Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!

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

Emil Cioran
When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

Emil Cioran
Life inspires more dread than death — it is life which is the great unknown.

Emil Cioran
From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.

Emil Cioran
When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.

Emil Cioran
Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.

Emil Cioran
For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

Emil Cioran
The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy.

Emil Cioran
I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.

Emil Cioran
I don't understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn't it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?

Emil Cioran
The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world.

Emil Cioran