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

Emil Cioran
Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.

Emil Cioran
The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it.

Emil Cioran
Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.

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

Emil Cioran
As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.

Emil Cioran
After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?

Emil Cioran
The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

Emil Cioran
Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.

Emil Cioran
Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!

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
Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

Emil Cioran
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

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

Emil Cioran
Thanks to depression - that alpinism of the indolent - we scale every summit and daydream over every precipice from our bed.

Emil Cioran
So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.

Emil Cioran
If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his deeds and designs, he would say, I want to be praised.

Emil Cioran
The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy.

Emil Cioran
If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.

Emil Cioran
I don't understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.

Emil Cioran
We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface...

Emil Cioran
Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.

Emil Cioran
The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it. Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?

Emil Cioran
For a long time—always, in fact—I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn't able to deal with it; for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.

Emil Cioran