Emil Cioran Quotes & Sayings

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and our memory. — Emil Cioran

The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue. — Emil Cioran

The apprenticeship to passivity - I know nothing more contrary to our habits. (The modern age begins with two hysterics: Don Quixote and Luther.) If we make time, produce and elaborate it, we do so out of our repugnance to the hegemony of essence and to the contemplative submission it presupposes. Taoism seems to me wisdom's first and last word: yet I resist it, my instincts reject it, as they refuse to endure anything - the heredity of revolt is too much for us. Our disease? Centuries of attention to time, the idolatry of becoming. What recourse to China or India will heal us? — Emil Cioran

The contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer. — Emil Cioran

Naive enough to set off in pursuit of Truth, I had explored - to no avail - any number of disciplines. I was beginning to be confirmed in my skepticism when the notion occurred to me of consulting, as a last result, Poetry: who knows? perhaps it would be profitable, perhaps it conceals beneath its arbitrary appearances some definitive revelation ... Illusory recourse! Poetry had outstripped be in negation and cost me even my uncertainties ... — Emil Cioran

When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What's your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act." And they do calm down. — Emil Cioran

Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are. — Emil Cioran

I have never had a goal, I have sought out no result. I think that there cannot be, in general just as well as for ourselves, neither goal nor result. Everything isn't without meaning - the word slightly puts me off- but without necessity. — Emil Cioran

The initial revelation of any monastery: everything is nothing. Thus begin all mysticisms. It is less than one step from nothing to God, for God is the positive expression of nothingness. — Emil Cioran

Here are experiences which one cannot survive, after which one feels that there is no meaning left in anything. Once you have reached the limits of life, having lived to extremity all that is offered at those dangerous borders, the everyday gesture and the usual aspiration lose their seductive charm. If you go on living, you do so only through your capacity for objectification, your ability to free yourself, in writing, from the infinite strain. Creativity is a temporary salvation from the claws of death — Emil Cioran

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one. — Emil Cioran

There are people to whom gain is unimportant, who are hopelessly unhappy and lonely. — Emil Cioran

Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don't know, and we don't really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless. — Emil Cioran

The only successful philosophies and religions are the ones that flatter us, whether in the name of progress or of hell. Damned or not, man experiences an absolute need to be at the heart of everything. — Emil Cioran

I try
without success
to stop finding reasons for vanity in anything. When I happen to manage it nonetheless, I feel that I no longer belong to the mortal gang. I am above everything then, above the gods themselves. Perhaps that is what death is: a sensation of great, of extreme superiority. — 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

Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred. — Emil Cioran

In Buddhist writings, mention is often made of "the abyss of birth." An abyss indeed, a gulf into which we do not fall but from which, instead, we emerge, to our universal chagrin. — Emil Cioran

You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life. — Emil Cioran

Ambition is a drug that turns it's addicts into potential madmen. — Emil Cioran

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die? — Emil Cioran

The lot of the man who has rebelled too much is to have no energy left except for disappointment. — Emil Cioran

Chatter: any conversation with someone who has not suffered. — Emil Cioran

For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened. ...
No sooner are they open than the drama beings. To look without understanding - that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much. ... — Emil Cioran

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

I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen
and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other ... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies. — Emil Cioran

We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves. — Emil Cioran

My vision of the future is so exact that if I had children, I should strangle them here and now. — 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 esthetic 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

What a swarm of the pseudo-"delivered" stares down at us from the pinnacle of their salvation! Their conscience is clear - do they not claim to locate themselves above their actions? An intolerable swindle. — Emil Cioran

If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God. — Emil Cioran

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world. — Emil Cioran

I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity. — Emil Cioran

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live
moreover, the only one. — Emil Cioran

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

In a world without melancholy, nightingales would start burping — Emil Cioran

To grant life more importance than it has is the mistake committed in sagging systems; as a consequence, no one is ready to sacrifice himself to defend them, and they collapse under the first blows perpetrated upon them. This is even more true of nations in general. Once they begin to hold life sacred, it abandons them, it ceases to be on their side. — Emil Cioran

One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world. — Emil Cioran

His sterility was infinite: it partook of ecstasy. — Emil Cioran

That there should be a reality hidden behind appearances is, after all, quite possible; that language might render such a thing would be an absurd hope. — Emil Cioran

Freedom is the right to difference; being plurality, it postulates the dispersion of the absolute, its resolution into a dust of truths, equally justified and provisional. There is an underlying polytheism in liberal democracy (call it an unconscious polytheism); conversely, every authoritarian regime partakes of a disguised monotheism. — Emil Cioran

I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if, creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity. Yet in a less assured mood, birth seems a calamity I would be miserable not having known. — Emil Cioran

Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist - a demonic, elemental, bestial pessimist - only when life has been defeated many times in its fight against depression. — Emil Cioran

It is our discomforts which provoke, which create consciousness; their task accomplished, they weaken and disappear one after the other. Consciousness however remains and survives them, without recalling what it owes to them, without even ever having known. Hence it continually proclaims its autonomy, its sovereignty, even when it loathes itself and would do away with itself. — 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

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

Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear. — Emil Cioran

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing. — Emil Cioran

Why don't I kill myself? If I knew exactly what keeps me from doing so, I should have no more questions to ask myself since I should have answered them all. — Emil Cioran

The deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life. — Emil Cioran

I was walking late one night along a tree-lined path; a chestnut fell at my feet. The noise it made as it burst, the resonance it provoked in me, and an upheaval out of all proportion to this insignificant event thrust me into miracle, into the rapture of the definitive, as if there were no more questions - only answers. I was drunk on a thousand unexpected discoveries, none of which I could make use of. ...
This is how I nearly reached the Supreme. But instead I went on with my walk. — Emil Cioran

We do not adopt a belief because it is true (they are all true), but because some obscure power impels us to do so. When this power leaves us, we suffer prostration and collapse, a tete-a-tete with what is left of ourselves. — Emil Cioran

True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes. — Emil Cioran

Every thought should recall the ruin of a smile. — Emil Cioran

I don't understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn't it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world? — Emil Cioran

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

Each opinion, each view is necessarily partial, truncated, inadequate. In philosophy and in anything, originality comes down to incomplete definitions. — Emil Cioran

Doubt works deep within you like a disease or, even more effectively, like a faith. — Emil Cioran

Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself. — Emil Cioran

Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture. — 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

The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release. — Emil Cioran

Only those are happy who never think or, rather, who only think about life's bare necessities, and to think about such things means not to think at all. True thinking resembles a demon who muddies the spring of life or a sickness which corrupts its roots. To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life, to leave behind you, as symbols of your life's drama, a trail of smoke and blood - all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you. — Emil Cioran

Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again. — Emil Cioran

He detested objective truths, the burden of argument, sustained reasoning. He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one. Others are a dialectician's invention. — Emil Cioran

Heroes abound at the dawn of civilizations, during pre-Homeric and Gothic epochs, when people, not having yet experienced spiritual torture, satisfy their thirst for renunciation through a derivative: heroism. — Emil Cioran

Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world. — Emil Cioran

Time, fertile in resources, more inventive and more charitable than we think, possesses a remarkable capacity to help us out, to afford us at any hour of the day some new humiliation. — Emil Cioran

We must beware of whatever insights we have into ourselves. Our self-knowledge annoys and paralyzes our daimon-this is where we should look for the reason Socrates wrote nothing. — Emil Cioran

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

It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other. — Emil Cioran

I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next. — Emil Cioran

It takes an enormous humility to die. The strange thing is that everyone turns out to have it! — Emil Cioran

Even as we ransack our own diseases, those of other people regard us no less. In an age of biographies, no one bandages his wounds without our attempting to lay them bare, to expose them to broad daylight; if we fail, we turn away, disappointed. And even he who endured on the cross - it is not because he suffered for us that he still counts for something in our eyes, but because he suffered and uttered several lamentations as profound as they were gratuitous. For what we venerate in our gods are our own defeats en beau. — Emil Cioran

Universal meaninglessness gives way to ecstatic inebriation, an orgy of irrationality. Since the world has no meaning, let us live! Without definite aims or accessible ideals, let us throw ourselves into the roaring whirlwind of infinity, follow its tortuous path in space, burn in its flames, love its cosmic madness and total anarchy! To live infinity, as well as to meditate a long time upon it, is the most terrifying lesson in anarchy and revolt one can ever learn. Infinity shakes you to the roots of your being, disorganizes you, but it also makes you forget the petty, the contingent, and the insignificant. — Emil Cioran

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

Nobody would dare look at himself in the mirror, because a grotesque, tragic image would mix in the contours of his face with stains and traces of blood, wounds which cannot be healed, and unstoppable streams of tears. I would experience a kind of voluptuous awe if I could see a volcano of blood, eruptions as red as fire and as burning as despair, burst into the midst of the comfortable and superficial harmony of everyday life, or if I could see all our hidden wounds open, making of us a bloody eruption forever. Only then would we truly understand and appreciate the advantage of loneliness, which silences our suffering and makes it inaccessible. The venom drawn out from suffering would be enough to poison the whole world in a bloody eruption, bursting out of the volcano of our being. There is so much venom, so much poison, in suffering! — Emil Cioran

Death is the solidest thing life has invented so far — Emil Cioran

It is no sign of benediction to have been obsessed with the lives of saints, for it is an obsession intertwined with a taste for maladies and hunger for depravities. One only troubles oneself with saints because one has been disappointed by the paradoxes of earthly life; one therefore searches out other paradoxes, more outlandish in guise, redolent of unknown truths, unknown perfumes ... — Emil Cioran

This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears. — Emil Cioran

To accomplish nothing and die of the strain — Emil Cioran

Men follow only those who give them illusions. There have never been gatherings around a disillusioned. — Emil Cioran

Each time I have a lapse of memory, I think of the anguish which must afflict those who know they no longer remember anything. But something tells me that after a certain time a secret joy possesses them, a joy they would not agree to trade for any of their memories, even the most stirring. ... — Emil Cioran

We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence. — Emil Cioran

Agression is a trait common to men and new gods. — 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 cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living. — Emil Cioran

I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony. — Emil Cioran

To be objective is to treat others as you treat an object, a corpse - to behave with them like an undertaker. — Emil Cioran

By sanctifying History in order to discredit God, Marxism has merely rendered Him more peculiar and more haunting. You can stifle every impulse in humanity except the need for an Absolute, which will survive the destruction of temples and even the disappearance of religion on earth. The core of the Russian people being religious, they will inevitably gain the upper hand ... — Emil Cioran

We are ourselves only by the sum of our failures. — Emil Cioran

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

Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time. — Emil Cioran

Even when they desert hell, men do so only to reconstruct it elsewhere. — Emil Cioran

Love of the absolute engenders a predilection for self-destruction. Hence the passion for monasteries and brothels. Cells and women, in both cases. Weariness with life fares well in the shadow of whores and saintly women. — Emil Cioran

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

Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic. — Emil Cioran

It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late. — Emil Cioran

I dream of a world where one could die for a comma. — Emil Cioran

I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws. — Emil Cioran