Emil Cioran Quotes

488 Sourced Quotes

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

Emil Cioran
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

Emil Cioran
Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught.

Emil Cioran
To make more plans than an explorer or a crook, yet to be infected at the will's very root.

Emil Cioran
I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.

Emil Cioran
When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment's thought to the "meaning" of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.

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

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

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

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

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
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
Every form of talent involves a certain shamelessness.

Emil Cioran
I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the Gods have been against me.

Emil Cioran
We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.

Emil Cioran
A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.

Emil Cioran
When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.

Emil Cioran
Tolerance — the function of an extinguished ardor — tolerance cannot seduce the young.

Emil Cioran
One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.

Emil Cioran
The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity…

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
We say: he has no talent, only tone. But tone is precisely what cannot be invented—we're born with it. Tone is an inherited grace, the privilege some of us have of making our organic pulsations felt—tone is more than talent, it is its essence.

Emil Cioran
What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!

Emil Cioran
Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious.

Emil Cioran
I long to be free—desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.

Emil Cioran
Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands?

Emil Cioran
A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

Emil Cioran
Death poses a problem which replaces all the others. What is deadly to philosophy, to the naive belief in the hierarchy of perplexities.

Emil Cioran
Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

Emil Cioran