Emil Cioran Quotes

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We suffer: the external world begins to exist...; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality.

Emil Cioran
Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.

Emil Cioran
For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.

Emil Cioran
Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection.

Emil Cioran
We replace God as best we can; for every god is good, provided he perpetuates in eternity our desire for a crucial solitude...

Emil Cioran
The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity… Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does this whispering voice say? Everything in us that is not human anymore.

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
Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.

Emil Cioran
Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.

Emil Cioran
Nothing surpasses the pleasures of idleness: even if the end of the world were to come, I would not leave my bed at an ungodly hour.

Emil Cioran
We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.

Emil Cioran
Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?

Emil Cioran
Read day and night, devour books—these sleeping pills—not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.

Emil Cioran
Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

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
Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

Emil Cioran
Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.

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

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
Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.

Emil Cioran
The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.

Emil Cioran
If I were asked to summarize as briefly as possible my vision of things, to reduce it to its most succinct expression, I should replace words with an exclamation point, a definitive!

Emil Cioran
The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.

Emil Cioran
The state of health is a state of nonsensation, even of nonreality. As soon as we cease to suffer, we cease to exist.

Emil Cioran
To have grazed every form of failure, including success.

Emil Cioran
Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.

Emil Cioran
The moment we believe we've understood everything grants us the look of a murderer.

Emil Cioran
Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.

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

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