Emile M. Cioran Quotes & Sayings

Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration. — Emile M. Cioran

What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts. — Emile M. Cioran

In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time. — Emile M. Cioran

So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes. — Emile M. Cioran

We are all geniuses when we dream. — Emile M. Cioran

My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers. — Emile M. Cioran

Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others. — Emile M. Cioran

What necessity impels a writer who has produced fifty books to write still one more? Why this proliferation, this fear of being forgotten, this debased coquetry? — Emile M. Cioran

One hardly saves a world without ruling it. — Emile M. Cioran

The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty-the sideshow of second thoughts-is his rule; he offers himself. — Emile M. Cioran

Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it. — Emile M. Cioran

Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears. — Emile M. Cioran

All that shimmers on the surface of the world, all that we call interesting, is the fruit of ignorance and inebriation. — Emile M. Cioran

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off. — Emile M. Cioran

To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself. — Emile M. Cioran

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation. — Emile M. Cioran

Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave. — Emile M. Cioran

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate. — Emile M. Cioran

The limit of every pain is an even greater pain. — Emile M. Cioran

What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity? — Emile M. Cioran

A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech. — Emile M. Cioran

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed. — Emile M. Cioran

True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats. — Emile M. Cioran

To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell — Emile M. Cioran

Glory - once achieved, what is it worth? — Emile M. Cioran

Hungarian Language - savage it may be but of a beauty that has nothing human about it, with sonorities of another universe, powerful and corrosive, appropriate to prayer, to groans and to tears, risen out of hell to perpetuate its accent and its aura ... words of nectar and cyanide. — Emile M. Cioran

Utopia is the grotesque en rose, the need to associate happiness
that is, the improbable
with becoming, and to coerce an optimistic, aerial vision to the point where it rejoins its own source: the very cynicism it sought to combat. In short, a monstrous fantasy. — Emile M. Cioran

Just as ecstasy purifies you of the particular and the contingent, leaving nothing except light and darkness, so insomnia kills off the multiplicity and diversity of the world, leaving you prey to your private obsessions. — Emile M. Cioran

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other. — Emile M. Cioran

Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived. — Emile M. Cioran

I do not want to see BP nickel and diming these businesses that are having a tough time. — Emile M. Cioran

To act is to anchor in the imminent future. — Emile M. Cioran

Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea. — Emile M. Cioran

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion. — Emile M. Cioran

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation. — Emile M. Cioran

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be. — Emile M. Cioran

When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves. — Emile M. Cioran

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on. — Emile M. Cioran

He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama. — Emile M. Cioran

We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune. — Emile M. Cioran

A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It's not easy to be on the wrong foot with life — Emile M. Cioran

Man is a robot with defects. — Emile M. Cioran

Maniacs of Procreation, bipeds with devalued faces, we have lost all appeal for each other. — Emile M. Cioran

Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise. — Emile M. Cioran

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers. — Emile M. Cioran

One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping. — Emile M. Cioran

A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice. — Emile M. Cioran

Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser. — Emile M. Cioran

Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us. — Emile M. Cioran

If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out. — Emile M. Cioran

Consider love: is there a nobler outpouring, a rapture less suspect? Its shudders rival music, compete with the tears of solitude and of ecstasy: sublime ... but a sublimity inseperable from the urinary tract: transports bordering upon excretion, a heaven of the glands, sudden sancitity of the orifices. It takes no more than a moment of attention for this intoxication, shaken, to cast you back into the ordures of physiology or a moment of fatigue to recognize that so much ardor produces only a variety of mucous. — Emile M. Cioran

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter. — Emile M. Cioran

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

How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws. — Emile M. 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. — Emile M. Cioran

Transmitting one's flaws [through procreation] to someone else is a crime. I could never consent to give life to someone who would inherent my ailments. — Emile M. Cioran

Pursued by our origins ... we all are. — Emile M. Cioran

What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist. — Emile M. Cioran

A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb. — Emile M. Cioran

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

Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young. — Emile M. Cioran

A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime ... — Emile M. Cioran

Everything is pathology, except for indifference. — Emile M. Cioran

Consciousness is nature's nightmare. — Emile M. Cioran

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us. — Emile M. Cioran

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude. — Emile M. Cioran

All philosophers should end their days at Pythia's feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments. — Emile M. Cioran

Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires. — Emile M. Cioran

A sensation must have fallen very low to deign to turn into an idea. — Emile M. Cioran

Every form of talent involves a certain shameless-ness. — Emile M. Cioran

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell. — Emile M. Cioran

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions. — Emile M. Cioran

I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night. — Emile M. Cioran

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

Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves. — Emile M. Cioran

If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame. — Emile M. Cioran

Those who believe in their truth
the only ones whose imprint is retained by the memory of men
leave the earth behind them strewn with corpses. Religions number in their ledgers more murders than the bloodiest tyrannies account for, and those whom humanity has called divine far surpass the most conscientious murderers in their thirst for slaughter. — Emile M. Cioran

He who hates himself is not humble. — Emile M. Cioran

Our first intuitions are the true ones. — Emile M. Cioran

We derive our vitality from our store of madness. — Emile M. Cioran

Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil. — Emile M. Cioran

For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion. — Emile M. Cioran

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen. — Emile M. Cioran

Thinking should be like musical meditation. Has any philosopher pursued a thought to its limits the way Bach or Beethoven develop and exhaust a musical theme? Even after having read the most profound thinkers, one still feels the need to begin anew. Only music gives definitive answers. — Emile M. Cioran

What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation. — Emile M. Cioran

Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves. — Emile M. Cioran

Where are my sensations? They have melted into ... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations? — Emile M. Cioran

The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster. — Emile M. Cioran

To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer. As soon as they consent to live, the unbeliever and the man of faith are fundamentally the same, since both have made the only decision that defines a being. — Emile M. Cioran

The amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its profundity. — Emile M. Cioran

In most cases we attach ourselves to in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify we can do without it, that we have found something better, and we also attach ourselves to God in horror of men. — Emile M. Cioran

Reality is a creation of our excesses. — Emile M. Cioran

The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men. — Emile M. Cioran

Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty. — Emile M. 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. — Emile M. Cioran

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

Boredom dismantles the mind, renders it superficial, out at the seams, saps it from within and dislocates it. — Emile M. Cioran

Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death! — Emile M. Cioran

We inhabit a language rather than a country. — Emile M. Cioran

That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit. — Emile M. Cioran