Emil Cioran Quotes

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The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools.

Emil Cioran
All philosophers should end their days at Pythia's feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.

Emil Cioran
If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

Emil Cioran
Knowledge is the plague of life, and consciousness, an open wound in its heart.

Emil Cioran
Without its assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation?

Emil Cioran
No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity;––for thoughts, there is always time; life has its time; there is no thought that comes too late; any desire can become a regret.

Emil Cioran
Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream.

Emil Cioran
An anxious man constructs his terrors, then installs himself within them: a stay-at-home in a yawning chasm.

Emil Cioran
Philosophy offers an antidote to melancholy. And many still believe in the depth of philosophy!

Emil Cioran
"What's wrong - what's the matter with you?" Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for...

Emil Cioran
One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.

Emil Cioran
Lucidity is the only vice which makes us free — free in a desert.

Emil Cioran
Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.

Emil Cioran
You have dreamed of setting the world ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light up a single one!

Emil Cioran
The skeptic is the least mysterious man in the world, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world.

Emil Cioran
As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad.

Emil Cioran
What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.

Emil Cioran
Life is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it.

Emil Cioran
All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.

Emil Cioran
Compared to the refined culture of sclerotic forms and frames, which mask everything, the lyrical mode is utterly barbarian in its expression. Its value resides precisely in its savage quality: it is only blood, sincerity, and fire.

Emil Cioran
I seem to myself, among civilised men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.

Emil Cioran
It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other.

Emil Cioran
At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j'ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.

Emil Cioran
As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.

Emil Cioran
How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.

Emil Cioran
To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing

Emil Cioran
I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.

Emil Cioran
Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.

Emil Cioran
We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.

Emil Cioran
The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?

Emil Cioran