Emile Cioran Quotes & Sayings

To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy. — 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

All great ideas should be followed by an exclamation mark - a warning signal similar to the skull and crossbones drawn on high-voltage transformers. — Emile M. Cioran

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

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling. — 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

I don't understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday. — Emile M. Cioran

History proves nothing because it contains everything. — Emile M. Cioran

Society: an inferno of saviors! — Emile M. Cioran

Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions. — Emile M. Cioran

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

Afflicted with existence, each man endures like an animal the consequences which proceed from it. Thus, in a world where everything is detestable, hatred becomes huger than the world and, having transcended its object, cancels itself out. — Emile M. Cioran

The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself. — 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

My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission. — Emile M. Cioran

No human beings are more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief — Emile M. Cioran

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

We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us. — Emile M. Cioran

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

What are you waiting for in order to give up? — Emile M. Cioran

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

The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy? — Emile M. Cioran

My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are. — Emile M. Cioran

All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute. — Emile M. Cioran

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

Humanity adores only those who cause it to perish. — Emile M. Cioran

The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others. — Emile M. Cioran

All people see fires, storms, explosions, or landscapes; but how many feel the flames, the lightnings, the whirlwinds, or the harmony? How many have an inner beauty that tinges their melancholy? — Emile M. Cioran

On Creating - What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures. — Emile M. Cioran

Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret. — Emile M. Cioran

To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation. — Emile M. Cioran

Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity. — Emile M. Cioran

Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in. — Emile M. Cioran

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all. — Emile M. Cioran

One doesn't live in a country, one lives in a language. — 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

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

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

What strangely enchanted tunes gush forth during those sleepless nights! — Emile M. Cioran

Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event? — Emile M. Cioran

Existing is plagiarism. — 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

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

I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers. — Emile M. Cioran

Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce. — Emile M. Cioran

To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall? — Emile M. Cioran

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

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

The Universal view melts things into a blur. — Emile M. Cioran

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

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

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers. — Emile M. Cioran

Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence. — Emile M. Cioran

No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive. — Emile M. Cioran

Basis of society: anonymous sweat. — Emile M. Cioran

The curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing now but mask and ghost. — Emile M. Cioran

Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish. — Emile M. Cioran

To live ... in any sense of the word ... is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence. — 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

Normal people have nothing to forget. — Emile M. Cioran

Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with our kind: the more we practice it, the more we become like everyone else: it is in the performance of a reputedly bestial function that we prove our status as citizens: nothing is more public than the sexual act. — Emile M. Cioran

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls. — Emile M. Cioran

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

Democracy: a festival of mediocrity. — Emile M. Cioran

"The Holy Ghost," Luther instructs us, "is not a skeptic." Not everyone can be, and that is really too bad. — 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

I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away. — Emile M. Cioran

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it. — Emile M. Cioran

The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims. — Emile M. Cioran

Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy. — Emile M. Cioran

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

What is pity but the vice of kindness. — Emile M. Cioran

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

Try to be free: you will die of hunger. — 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

If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices. — Emile M. Cioran

A book has to dig through the wounds, more, it has cause a new one, a book it has to be dangerous. — Emile M. Cioran

Every profound dissatisfaction is of a religious nature: our failures derive from our incapacity to conceive of paradise and to aspire to it, as our discomforts from the fragility of our relations with the absolute. — Emile M. Cioran

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words. — Emile M. Cioran

To Foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by the hatred smothered within. — 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

To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life. — 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

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