Emil Cioran Quotes

488 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Emil Cioran
Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.

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

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

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

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

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

Emil Cioran
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
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

Emil Cioran
Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?

Emil Cioran
I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to empty abstraction.

Emil Cioran
We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

Emil Cioran
The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.

Emil Cioran
I dream of wanting - and all I want seems to me worthless.

Emil Cioran
If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.

Emil Cioran
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

Emil Cioran
Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

Emil Cioran
To conceive a thought - just one, but one that would tear the universe to pieces.

Emil Cioran
If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.

Emil Cioran
I want to proclaim a truth that would forever exile me from among the living. I know only the conditions but not the words that would allow me to formulate it.

Emil Cioran
The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

Emil Cioran
I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.

Emil Cioran
Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.

Emil Cioran
If someone incessantly drops the word "life," you know he's a sick man.

Emil Cioran