Emile M. Cioran famous quotes

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

#Intuition #Firsts

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#World #Evidence

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

#Religious #Healthy #Mind

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

#Cynical #Democracy #Mediocrity

Vague a l'ame — melancholy yearning for the end of the world.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#End Of The World #Melancholy #Ends

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

#Suicide #Ideas

A book is a suicide postponed.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Suicide #Book

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

#Matter #Loser

I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Country #Groups #Feels

There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Other Worlds #Nihilism #Patents

Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Born #Plans

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Suicide #Succeed #Reason

Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself — there is no wish I make more often.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Mind #Wish #Position

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

#Self #Flaws #Easy

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

#Desire #My One And Only #Concern

By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Suicide #Aberration #Normal

You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Hate #Loving Life #Men

I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Enemy #Ends

Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Regret #Men #World

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

#Punishment #Age #Old Age

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

#Revenge #Men #Order

I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Trying #Granted #Hours

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

#Pride #Revelations

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

#Fear #Inspire #Dread

What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Morning #Night #Endure

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Being Yourself #Chaos

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

#Giving Up #Order #Giving

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

#Disease #Reincarnation #Born

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

#Book #Writing #Dare

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

#Dream #Sleep #Genius

Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Sweet #Revenge #Victim

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Fear #Fearless

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

#Jealousy #Secret #Aversion

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

#Ambition #Addiction #Drug

Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Music #Soul #Music Is

I try--without success--to stop finding reasons for vanity in anything. When I happen to manage it nonetheless, I feel that I no longer belong to the mortal gang. I am above everything then, above the gods themselves. Perhaps that is what death is: a sensation of great, of extreme superiority.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Vanity #Trying #Gang

As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Girl #Philosophical #Fighting

No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Matter #Way #Have Faith

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Borders #Kind #Misanthropy

We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Want #Not Sure #Dread

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

#Love Is #Heaven #Solitude

Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#People #Life And Death #Overcoming

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

#Ghost #Mask #Holes

I have always struggled, with the sole intention of ceasing to struggle. Result: zero.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Zero #Struggle #Intention

When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Men #Relief #Lasts

We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Conviction

The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Hero #Fighting #Destiny

Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Powerful #Blow #Brain

If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
-- Emile M. Cioran

The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion...one would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Light #Return #Chaos

It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say “we" with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke "others" and regard himself as their interpreter - for me to consider him my enemy.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Philosophy #Enemy #Enough

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

#Time #Men #Doe

Between the demand to be clear,and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Temptation #Demand #Impossible

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

#Despair #Tasks #Olympian

Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Home #Existence #Exile

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

#Men #Fascination #Saint

To live entirely without a goal! I have glimpsed this state, and have often attained it, without managing to remain there: I am too weak for such happiness.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Goal #Weak #States

Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Looks #Answers #Earth

One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Lonely #Loneliness #Two

Tyrants are always assassinated too late. That is their great excuse.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Freedom #Tyrants #Too Late

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

#Sweat #Bases

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

#History #Prove

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Memories #Imagination #Life Is

The universal view melts things into a blur.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Views #Blur

No one can keep his griefs in their prime; they use themselves up.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Grief #Grieving #Use

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

#Reality #Excess #Creation

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

#Ideas #Way #Next

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

#Self

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

#Passion #Reality #Men

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

#Time #Sleep #Rivals

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

#Time #Want #Tough

There was a time when time did not yet exist.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Time

True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Fire #Tears #Ashes

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose dying: Everything!
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Dying #Lost #Born

Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Wish #Vomiting #Sometimes

When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, “What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act.” And they do calm down.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Suicide #People #Want

To have committed every crime but that of being a father.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Father #Being A Father #Crime

At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Suffering #Events #Moments

For a long time—always, in fact—I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn’t able to deal with it; for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Spiritual #Pride #Erosion

There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Time #Rejection #Nostalgia

To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Morning #Giving #Waiting

To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Aliens #Indifference #Claims

The reaction against your own thought in itself lends life to thought. How this reaction is born is hard to describe, because it identifies with the very rare intellectual tragedies. ––The tension, the degree and level of intensity of a thought proceeds from its internal antinomies, which in turn are derived from the unsolvable contradictions of a soul. Thought cannot solve the contradictions of the soul. As far as linear thinking is concerned, thoughts mirror themselves in other thoughts, instead of mirroring a destiny.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Destiny #Thinking #Mirrors

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

#Writing #Philosopher #Professors

To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Sacrifice #Envy #Venture

To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel you are consubstantial with that future.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Anchors #Tangible #Feels

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

#Mean #Prove

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

#May #Incapacity

The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
-- Emile M. Cioran

#Mind #Flesh #Results