Emil Cioran Quotes

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Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?

Emil Cioran
How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history—greater than the fall of empires—I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.

Emil Cioran
The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them.

Emil Cioran
There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books.

Emil Cioran
If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?

Emil Cioran
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

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
I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.

Emil Cioran
"Neither this world, nor the next, nor happiness are for the being abandoned to doubt." - This point in the Gita is my death sentence.

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

Emil Cioran
Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.

Emil Cioran
They ask you for facts, proofs, works, and all you can show them are transformed tears.

Emil Cioran
Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.

Emil Cioran
A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.

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
No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.

Emil Cioran
The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

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

Emil Cioran
I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which has spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations.

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

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

Emil Cioran
What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.

Emil Cioran
Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.

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

Emil Cioran
Unlike Job, I have not cursed the day I was born; all the other days, on the contrary, I have covered with my anathemas.

Emil Cioran