Emil Cioran Quotes

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What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.

Emil Cioran
When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment's thought to the "meaning" of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.

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

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

Emil Cioran
There are no arguments. Can anyone who has reached the limit bother with arguments, causes, effects, moral considerations, and so forth? Of course not. For such a person there are only unmotivated motives for living. On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos. When all the current reasons—moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on—no longer guide one's life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.

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

Emil Cioran
One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.

Emil Cioran
God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.

Emil Cioran
A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of his talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.

Emil Cioran
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

Emil Cioran
When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.

Emil Cioran
We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false.

Emil Cioran
We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job...

Emil Cioran
Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.

Emil Cioran
Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn't deserve to be known.

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
What place do we occupy in the "universe"? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we are evidently so insignificant? Once we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.

Emil Cioran
The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness.

Emil Cioran
No one has the audacity to exclaim: I don't want to do anything! —we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions.

Emil Cioran
To tell the truth, I couldn't care less about the relativity of knowledge, simply because the world does not deserve to be known.

Emil Cioran
By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

Emil Cioran
Vague a l'ame — melancholy yearning for the end of the world.

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
There exists, I grant you, a clinical depression, upon which certain remedies occasionally have effect; but there exists another kind, a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself.

Emil Cioran
To live... in any sense of the word... is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence.

Emil Cioran