Emil Cioran Quotes

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Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence.

Emil Cioran
Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.

Emil Cioran
Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

Emil Cioran
One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death's prisoner.

Emil Cioran
They ask you for facts, proofs, works, and all you can show them are transformed tears.

Emil Cioran
The state of health is a state of nonsensation, even of nonreality. As soon as we cease to suffer, we cease to exist.

Emil Cioran
I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.

Emil Cioran
Psychoanalysis will be entirely discredited one of these days, no doubt about it. Which will not keep it from destroying our last vestiges of naivete. After psychoanalysis, we can never again be innocent.

Emil Cioran
Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself.

Emil Cioran
We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

Emil Cioran
Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!

Emil Cioran
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

Emil Cioran
Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world.

Emil Cioran
For a long while I have lived with the notion that I was the most normal being that ever existed. This notion gave me the taste, even the passion for being unproductive: what was the use of being prized in a world inhabited by madmen, a world mired in mania and stupidity? For whom was one to bother, and to what end? It remains to be seen if I have quite freed myself from this certitude, salvation in the absolute, ruin in the immediate.

Emil Cioran
I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which has spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations.

Emil Cioran
Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn't deserve to be known.

Emil Cioran
Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.

Emil Cioran
The moment we believe we've understood everything grants us the look of a murderer.

Emil Cioran
Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.

Emil Cioran
To have grazed every form of failure, including success.

Emil Cioran
Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.

Emil Cioran
Nothing surpasses the pleasures of idleness: even if the end of the world were to come, I would not leave my bed at an ungodly hour.

Emil Cioran
We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.

Emil Cioran
Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?

Emil Cioran
Read day and night, devour books—these sleeping pills—not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.

Emil Cioran
Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

Emil Cioran
The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it. Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?

Emil Cioran
Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

Emil Cioran
If I were asked to summarize as briefly as possible my vision of things, to reduce it to its most succinct expression, I should replace words with an exclamation point, a definitive!

Emil Cioran
The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.

Emil Cioran