Top 108 Quotes & Sayings by Emil Cioran

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

Emil Mihai Cioran was a Romanian philosopher and essayist, who published works in both Romanian and French. His work has been noted for its pervasive philosophical pessimism, style, and aphorisms. His works frequently engaged with issues of suffering, decay, and nihilism. In 1937, Cioran moved to the Latin Quarter of Paris, which became his permanent residence, wherein he lived in seclusion with his partner, Simone Boué.

Romanian - Philosopher | April 8, 1911 - June 20, 1995

Source: Wikipedia

However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

Everything is pathology, except for indifference.

Emil Cioran

The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.

Emil 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.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

God - a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.

Emil 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.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.

Emil Cioran

Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

Emil Cioran

Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.

Emil Cioran

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

The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.

Emil Cioran

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.

Emil Cioran

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

Emil Cioran

I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?

Emil Cioran

The Universal view melts things into a blur.

Emil Cioran

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

Emil Cioran

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.

Emil Cioran

A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.

Emil Cioran

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Emil Cioran

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.

Emil Cioran

We inhabit a language rather than a country.

Emil Cioran

Word - that invisible dagger.

Emil Cioran

I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.

Emil Cioran

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

Emil Cioran

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.

Emil Cioran

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

Emil Cioran

To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.

Emil Cioran

Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?

Emil Cioran

I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.

Emil Cioran

Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.

Emil Cioran

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.

Emil Cioran

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

Emil Cioran

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

Emil Cioran

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

Emil Cioran

We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.

Emil Cioran

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.

Emil Cioran

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

Emil 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.

Emil Cioran

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

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

Emil Cioran

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