Emil Cioran Quotes

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

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

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

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

Emil Cioran
To think is to run after insecurity, to be demoralized for grandiose trifles, to immure oneself in abstractions with a martyr's avidity, to hunt up complications the way others pursue collapse or gain. The thinker is by definition keen for torment.

Emil Cioran
The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It's not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.

Emil Cioran
The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?

Emil Cioran
We always love... despite; and that "despite" covers an infinity.

Emil Cioran
No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.

Emil Cioran
The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.

Emil Cioran
All morning, I did nothing but repeat: "Man is an abyss, man is an abyss." - I could not, alas, find anything better.

Emil Cioran
On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I."

Emil Cioran
To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

Emil Cioran
To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.

Emil Cioran
Even in childhood I watched the hours flow, independent of any reference, any action, any event, the disjunction of time from what was not itself, its autonomous existence, its special status, its empire, its tyranny. I remember quite clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts. Time was coming unstuck from being—at my expense.

Emil Cioran
The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to form a reality to reality's detriment.

Emil Cioran
I don't need any support, advice, or compassion, because even if I am the most ruinous man, I still feel so powerful, so strong and fierce. For I am the only one that lives without hope.

Emil Cioran
That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.

Emil Cioran
A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It's not easy to be on the wrong foot with life

Emil Cioran
In order to conceive, and to steep ourselves in, unreality, we must have it constantly present to our minds. The day we feel it, see it, everything becomes unreal, except that unreality which alone makes existence tolerable.

Emil Cioran
Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself.

Emil Cioran
Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?

Emil Cioran
We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

Emil Cioran
God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.

Emil Cioran
To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously.

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

Emil Cioran
To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.

Emil Cioran
Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.

Emil Cioran