Emil Cioran - Man Quotes

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The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

Emil Cioran
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

Emil Cioran
When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years.

Emil Cioran
When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.

Emil Cioran
Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

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
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
If someone incessantly drops the word "life," you know he's a sick man.

Emil Cioran
Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands?

Emil Cioran
What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.

Emil Cioran
His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.

Emil Cioran
One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death's prisoner.

Emil Cioran
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?

Emil Cioran
As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and aesthetic ideals? It's all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?

Emil Cioran
Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself.

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
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
A man does not kill himself, as is commonly supposed, in a fit of madness but rather in a fit of unendurable lucidity, in a paroxysm which may, if so desired, be identified with madness; for an excessive perspicacity, carried to the limit and of which one longs to be rid at all costs, exceeds the context of reason.

Emil Cioran
Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation.

Emil Cioran
If a man has not, by the time he is thirty, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned — a saint or a corpse.

Emil Cioran
Man started out on the wrong foot. The misadventure in paradise was the first consequence. The rest had to follow.

Emil Cioran
An anxious man constructs his terrors, then installs himself within them: a stay-at-home in a yawning chasm.

Emil Cioran
Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.

Emil Cioran
A minimum of unconsciousness is necessary if one wants to stay inside history. To act is one thing; to know one is acting is another. When lucidity invests the action, insinuates itself into it, action is undone, and with it, prejudice, whose function consists, precisely, in subordinating, in enslaving consciousness to action. The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depths. No man concerned with his equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.

Emil Cioran
I am for the most part so convinced that everything is lacking in basis, consequence, justification, that if someone dared to contradict me, even the man I most admire, he would seem to me a charlatan or a fool.

Emil Cioran
A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...

Emil Cioran
Though we may prefer ourselves to the universe, we nonetheless loathe ourselves much more than we suspect. If the wise man is so rare a phenomenon, it is because he seems unshaken by the aversion which, like all beings, he must feel for himself.

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
Vengeance is a need, the most intense and profound of all, and…each man must satisfy it, if only in words. If we stifle that need, we expose ourselves to certain disturbances. More than one disorder—perhaps all disorders—derive from a vengeance too long postponed.

Emil Cioran
What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?

Emil Cioran