Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran.
Last updated on November 25, 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.
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.
For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
Everything is pathology, except for indifference.
The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.
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.
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.
God - a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
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.
Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.
Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.
Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
The Universal view melts things into a blur.
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.
A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.
We inhabit a language rather than a country.
Word - that invisible dagger.
I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.
Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.
Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.
Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.
Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
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.
Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.
Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.