Emil Cioran Quotes

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

Emil Cioran
The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue.

Emil Cioran
How I wish I didn't know anything about myself and this world!

Emil Cioran
If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.

Emil Cioran
"Where do you get those superior airs of yours?" "I've managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?"

Emil Cioran
In order to deceive melancholy, you must keep moving. Once you stop, it wakens, if in fact it has ever dozed off.

Emil Cioran
To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire.

Emil Cioran
My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

Emil Cioran
At different degrees, everything is pathology, except for indifference.

Emil Cioran
When we know what words are worth, the amazing thing is that we try to say anything at all, and that we manage to do so. This requires, it is true, a supernatural nerve.

Emil Cioran
A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints.

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

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
Only optimists commit suicide, the optimists who can no longer be... optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?

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

Emil Cioran
Every form of talent involves a certain shamelessness.

Emil Cioran
We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.

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

Emil Cioran
"Do I look like someone who has something to do here on Earth?" - That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

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 are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.

Emil Cioran
Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.

Emil Cioran
Nothing deserves to be undone, doubtless because nothing deserved to be done.

Emil Cioran
Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.

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

Emil Cioran