Emil M. Cioran Quotes & Sayings

Once I had a "self"; now I am no more than an object. — Emil M. Cioran

Even in childhood I watched the hours flow, independent of any reference, any action, any event, the disjunction of time from what was not itself, its autonomous existence, its special status, its empire, its tyranny. I remember quite clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts. Time was coming unstuck from being - at my expense. — Emil M. Cioran

The cynicism of utter solitude is a calvary relieved by insolence. — Emil M. Cioran

The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to a form of reality to reality's detriment. — Emil M. Cioran

Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that he alone pursues the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear. — Emil M. Cioran

Stoicism for show: to be an enthusiast of nil admirari, an hysteric of ataraxia. — Emil M. Cioran

The human being delivered to himself, without any partiality for elegance, is a monster. — Emil M. Cioran

I don't need any support, encouragement, or consolation because, although I am the lowest of men, I feel nonetheless so strong, so hard, so savage! For I am the only man who lives with- out hope, the apex of heroism and paradox. — Emil M. Cioran

Call it insensitivity or a passion for remorse, I have never undertaken to rescue what little Absolute this world contains. — Emil M. Cioran

My greed for agonies has made me die so many times that it strikes me as indecent to keep on abusing a corpse from which I can get nothing more. — Emil M. Cioran

Despair is the state in which anxiety and restlessness are immanent to existence. Nobody in despair suffers from "problems", but from his own inner torment and fire. It's a pity that nothing can be solved in this world. Yet there never was and here never will be anyone who would commit suicide for this reason. So much for the power that intellectual anxiety has over the total anxiety of our being! That is why I prefer the dramatic life, consumed by inner fires and tortured by destiny, to the intellectual, caught up in abstractions which do not engage the essence of our subjectivity. I despise the absence of risks, madness and passion in abstract thinking. How fertile live, passionate thinking is! Lyricism feeds it like blood pumped into the heart! — Emil M. Cioran

Every 'I' begins with a crack and a revelation. — Emil M. Cioran

A discourse approaches universality when it frees itself from its origins, leaves them behind, disavows them: having reached this point, if it would reinvigorate itself, avoid unreality or sclerosis, it must renounce its own exigencies, break its forms and its models, it must condescend to bad taste. — Emil M. Cioran

Any and all water is the color of drowning. — Emil M. Cioran

God does not read. — Emil M. Cioran

To dissect a poem as if it were a system is a crime, even a sacrilege. — Emil M. Cioran

Nature's great mistake was to have been unable to confine herself to one "kingdom": juxtaposed with the vegetable, everything else seems inopportune, out of place. The sun should have sulked at the appearance of the first insect, and gone out altogether with the advent of the chimpanzee. — Emil M. Cioran

Tolerance cannot seduce the young. — Emil M. Cioran

If only we could return to those ages when no utterance shackled existence, to the laconism of interjections, to the joyous stupor of the pre- verbal! — Emil M. Cioran

If only we could reach back before the concept, could write on a level with the senses, record the infinitesimal variations of what we touch, do what a reptile would do if it were to set about writing! — Emil M. Cioran

I have no ideas, only obsessions. Anybody can have ideas. Ideas have never caused anybody's downfall. — Emil M. Cioran

Explosive force of any mortification. Every vanquished desire affords us power. We have the more hold over this world the further we withdraw from it, the less we adhere to it. Renunciation confers an infinite power. — Emil M. Cioran

The mission of Everyman is to fulfill the lies he incarnates, to succeed in being no more than an exhaust illusion. — Emil M. Cioran

If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing it.
Becoming: an agony without an ending.The older I grow, the less I enjoy performing my little Hamlet. The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death. If History had a goal, how lamentable would be the fate of those of us who have accomplished nothing!
On the frontiers of the self: 'What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I'. Events - tumours of time.
Man secretes disaster.
The secret of my adaptation to life? - I've changed despairs the way I've changed shirts. Each day is a Rubicon in which I aspire to be drowned. — Emil M. Cioran

Ever since I was born" - that since has a resonance so dreadful to my ears it becomes unendurable. — Emil M. Cioran

A free man is one who has discerned the inanity of all points of view; a liberated man is one who has drawn the consequences of such discernment. — Emil M. Cioran

Rather in a gutter than on a pedestal. — Emil M. Cioran

The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life. — Emil M. Cioran

Mystery - a word we use to deceive others, to convince them we are "deeper" than they are. — Emil M. Cioran

Memory's one function is to help us regret — Emil M. Cioran

Born weary of being born, he chose to be a shade; when, then, did he live, and by the transgression of what birth? And if, living, he wore his shroud, by what miracle did he manage to die? — Emil M. Cioran

After a sleepless night, the people in the street seem automatons. No one seems to breathe, to walk, Each looks as if he is worked by clockwork: nothing spontaneous; mechanical smiles, spectral gesticulations. Yourself a specter, how would you see others as alive? — Emil M. Cioran

A book is a suicide postponed. — Emil M. Cioran

A little more fervor in my nihilism and I might - gainsaying everything - shake off my doubts and triumph over them. But I have only the taste of negation, not its grace. — Emil M. Cioran

The artist abandoning his poem, exasperated by the indigence of words, prefigures the confusion of the mind discontented within the context of the existent. Incapacity to organize the elements - as stripped of meaning and savor as the words which express them - leads to the revelation of the void. Thus the rhymer withdraws into silence or into impenetrable artifices. — Emil M. Cioran

My disappointments, instead of converging toward a center and constituting if not a system at least an ensemble, are scattered, each supposed itself unique and thereby wasted, lacking organization. — Emil M. Cioran

Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. — Emil M. Cioran

During the long nights in the caves, how many Hamlets must have murmured their endless monologues - for it is likely that the apogee of metaphysical torment is to be located well before that universal insipidity which followed the advent of Philosophy. — Emil M. Cioran

The more we frequent men, the blacker our thoughts; and when, to clarify them, we return to our solitude, we find there the shadow they have cast. — Emil M. Cioran

No one reads to know, but to forget — Emil M. Cioran

A remark of my brother's apropos of the troubles and pains our mother endured: "Old age is nature's self-criticism. — Emil M. Cioran

Akhmatova, like Gogol, wanted to possess nothing. She gave away the presents given to her, and a few days later they would be found in other people's houses. This characteristic recalls the behavior of nomads, compelled to the provisional by necessity and by choice...When eastern Europe furnishes such models of detachment, why seek them out in India or elsewhere? (from Anathemas and Admirations) — Emil M. Cioran

Our power resides in our incapacity to know how alone we are. — Emil M. Cioran

Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies. — Emil M. Cioran

Tears do not burn except in solitude. — Emil M. Cioran

The compulsion to preach is so rooted in us that it emerges from depths unknown to the instinct for self-preservation. Each of us awaits his moment in order to propose something - anything. He has a voice: that is enough. It costs us dear to be neither deaf nor dumb. . .

From snobs to scavengers, all expend their criminal generosity, all hand out formulas for happiness, all try to give directions: life in common thereby becomes intolerable, and life with oneself still more so; if you fail to meddle in other people's business you are so uneasy about your, own that you convert your "self" into a religion, or, apostle in reverse, you deny it altogether; we are victims of the universal game. . . — Emil M. Cioran

The terrifying experience and obsession of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of yourself. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness. — Emil M. Cioran

Beatitude through suffering is an illusion, since it requires a reconciliation to the fatality of pain in order to avoid total annihilation. — Emil M. Cioran

Only god has the privilege of abandoning us. Men can only drop us — Emil M. Cioran

As far back as I can remember, I've utterly destroyed within myself the pride of being human. And I saunter to the periphery of the Race like a timorous monster, lacking the energy to claim kinship with some other band of apes. — Emil M. Cioran

I had gone far in search of the sun, and the sun, found at last, was hostile to me. And if I were to fling myself off a cliff? While I was making such rather grim speculations, considering these pines, these rocks, these waves, I suddenly felt how bound I was to this lovely, accursed universe. — Emil M. Cioran

Frivolous, disconnected, an amateur at everything, I shall have known thoroughly only the disadvantage of having been born. — Emil M. Cioran

The Real gives me asthma. — Emil M. Cioran

The best of myself, that point of light which distances me from everything, I owe to my infrequent encounters with a few bitter fools, a few disconsolate bastards, who, victims of the rigor of their cynicism, could no longer attach themselves to any vice. — Emil M. Cioran

If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live? — Emil M. 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 M. Cioran

No one has lived so close to his skeleton as I have lived to mine: from which results an endless dialogue and certain truths which I manage neither to accept nor to reject. — Emil M. Cioran

Word - That invisible dagger. — Emil M. Cioran

Kill yourself because of what you are, yes, but not because all humanity would spit in your face! — Emil M. Cioran

Boredom in the midst of paradise generated our first ancestor's appetite for the abyss which has won us this procession of centuries whose end we now have in view. That appetite, a veritable nostalgia for hell, would not fail to ravage the race following us and to make it the worthy heir of our misfortunes. — Emil M. Cioran

Were we in the habit of looking beyond the specific content of ideologies and doctrines, we should see that to claim kinship with one of them rather than some other does not at all imply much expenditure of sagacity. Those following one party imagine they differ from those following another, whereas all, once they choose, join each other underneath, participate in one and the same nature, and vary only in appearance, by the mask they assume. — Emil M. Cioran

Enlightened despotism: the only regime that can attract a disabused mind, one incapable of being the accomplice of revolutions since it is not even the accomplice of history. — Emil M. Cioran

You with your veins full of night - you have no more place among men than an epitaph in the middle of a circus. — Emil M. Cioran

Compassion is a sign of superficiality: broken destinies and unrelenting misery either make you scream or turn you to stone. — Emil M. Cioran

All that is Life in me urges me to give up God. — Emil M. Cioran