Emil Cioran Quotes

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

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

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
Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream.

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

Emil Cioran
As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.

Emil Cioran
All that shimmers on the surface of the world, all that we call interesting, is the fruit of ignorance and inebriation.

Emil Cioran
Man started out on the wrong foot. The misadventure in paradise was the first consequence. The rest had to follow.

Emil Cioran
What music appeals to in us it is difficult to know; what we do know is that music reaches a zone so deep that madness itself cannot penetrate there.

Emil Cioran
I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.

Emil Cioran
I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.

Emil Cioran
How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.

Emil Cioran
You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.

Emil Cioran
To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell

Emil Cioran
The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?

Emil Cioran
We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.

Emil Cioran
Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.

Emil Cioran
I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.

Emil Cioran
To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing

Emil Cioran
How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.

Emil Cioran
What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.

Emil Cioran
"What's wrong - what's the matter with you?" Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for...

Emil Cioran
One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.

Emil Cioran
Lucidity is the only vice which makes us free — free in a desert.

Emil Cioran
Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.

Emil Cioran
You have dreamed of setting the world ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light up a single one!

Emil Cioran
The skeptic is the least mysterious man in the world, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world.

Emil Cioran
As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad.

Emil Cioran
It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other.

Emil Cioran