Emil Cioran Quotes

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One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.

Emil Cioran
I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end.

Emil Cioran
Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?

Emil Cioran
The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it.

Emil Cioran
By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

Emil Cioran
It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.

Emil Cioran
We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false.

Emil Cioran
Unlike Job, I have not cursed the day I was born; all the other days, on the contrary, I have covered with my anathemas.

Emil Cioran
Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

Emil Cioran
To conceive a thought - just one, but one that would tear the universe to pieces.

Emil Cioran
If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.

Emil Cioran
I want to proclaim a truth that would forever exile me from among the living. I know only the conditions but not the words that would allow me to formulate it.

Emil Cioran
The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

Emil Cioran
I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.

Emil Cioran
Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.

Emil Cioran
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

Emil Cioran
Vengeance is a need, the most intense and profound of all, and…each man must satisfy it, if only in words. If we stifle that need, we expose ourselves to certain disturbances. More than one disorder—perhaps all disorders—derive from a vengeance too long postponed.

Emil Cioran
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

Emil Cioran
Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.

Emil Cioran
The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.

Emil Cioran
If someone incessantly drops the word "life," you know he's a sick man.

Emil Cioran
The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous.

Emil Cioran
Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.

Emil Cioran
If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.

Emil Cioran
I dream of wanting - and all I want seems to me worthless.

Emil Cioran
The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.

Emil Cioran
We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

Emil Cioran
I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to empty abstraction.

Emil Cioran
Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?

Emil Cioran
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

Emil Cioran