Emil Cioran Quotes

488 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
Without the possibility of suicide, I would have killed myself long ago.

Emil Cioran
Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?

Emil Cioran
Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.

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

Emil Cioran
Without will, no conflict: no tragedy among the abulic. Yet the failure of will can be experienced more painfully than a tragic destiny.

Emil Cioran
The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.

Emil Cioran
The flesh spreads, further and further, like a gangrene upon the surface of the globe. It cannot impose limits upon itself, it continues to be rife despite its rebuffs, it takes its defeats for conquests, it has never learned anything. It belongs above all to the realm of the Creator, and it is indeed in the flesh that He has projected His maleficent instincts.

Emil Cioran
We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die. - Didn't you know that's how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?

Emil Cioran
Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.

Emil Cioran
To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!

Emil Cioran
I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.

Emil Cioran
There are questions which, once approached, either isolate you or kill you outright.

Emil Cioran
There exists, I grant you, a clinical depression, upon which certain remedies occasionally have effect; but there exists another kind, a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself.

Emil Cioran
We regret not having the courage to make such and such decision; we regret much more having made one - any one. Better no action than the consequences of an action.

Emil Cioran
Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.

Emil Cioran
Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?

Emil Cioran
This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.

Emil Cioran
As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and aesthetic ideals? It's all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?

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

Emil Cioran
I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action - mother of all vices - I am the cause of no one's suffering.

Emil Cioran
There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.

Emil Cioran
The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.

Emil Cioran
"I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside." This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works on introspection.

Emil Cioran
It makes no sense to say that death is the goal of life, but what else is there to say?

Emil Cioran