Cioran Quotes

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

To grant life more importance than it has is the mistake committed in sagging systems; as a consequence, no one is ready to sacrifice himself to defend them, and they collapse under the first blows perpetrated upon them. This is even more true of nations in general. Once they begin to hold life sacred, it abandons them, it ceases to be on their side. ~ Emil Cioran

Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself? ~ Emil Cioran

If you love your independence, you must lend yourself, in order to protect it, to every turpitude; you must risk ignominy itself. ~ Emil M. Cioran

Society: an inferno of saviors! ~ 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

Rather in a gutter than on a pedestal. ~ Emil M. Cioran

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. ~ Emil Cioran

Under each formula lies a corpse. ~ Emile M. Cioran

Look neither ahead nor behind, look into yourself, with neither fear nor regret. No one descends into himself so long as he remains a slave of the past or of the future. ~ Emil M. Cioran

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

I'm very drawn to Eastern Europe, so I like a Hungarian writer who wrote in French called Emil Cioran; he was always good for giving me such a stir. ~ Dylan Moran

Everyone has had, at a given moment, an extraordinary experience which will be for him, because of the memory of it he preserves, the crucial obstacle to his inner metamorphosis. ~ Emil Cioran

It is a mistake to think of the expatriate as someone who abdicates, who withdraws and humbles himself, resigned to his miseries, his outcast state. On a closer look, he turns out to be ambitious, aggressive in his disappointments, his very acrimony qualified by his belligerence. The more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and illusions become. I even discern some relation between misfortune and megalomania. The man who has lost everything preserves as a last resort the hope of glory, or of literary scandal. He consents to abandon everything, except his name. [ . . . ]

Let us say a man writes a novel which makes him, overnight, a celebrity. In it he recounts his sufferings. His compatriots in exile envy him: they too have suffered, perhaps more. And the man without a country becomes - or aspires to become - a novelist. The consequence: an accumulation of confusions, an inflation of horrors, of frissons that date. One cannot keep renewing Hell, whose very characteristic is monotony, or the face of exile either. Nothing in literature exasperates a reader so much as The Terrible; in life, it too is tainted with the obvious to rouse our interest. But our author persists; for the time being he buries his novel in a drawer and awaits his hour. The illusion of surprise, of a renown which eludes his grasp but on which he reckons, sustains him; he lives on unreality. Such, however, is the power of this illusion that if, for instance, he works in some factor ~ Emil M. Cioran

So long as our untried senses and our naïve heart recognize themselves and delight in the universe of qualifications, they flourish with the aid and at the risk of the adjective, which, once dissected, proves inadequate, deficient. We say of space, of time, and of suffering that they are infinite; but infinite has no more bearing than beautiful, sublime, harmonious, ugly.... Suppose we force ourselves to see to the bottom of words? We see nothing - each of them, detached from the expansive and fertile soul, being null and void. The power of the intelligence functions by projecting a certain luster upon them, by polishing them and making them glitter; this power, erected into a system, is called culture - pryrotechnics against a night sky of nothingness. ~ Emil 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. ~ Emil Cioran

Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again. ~ Emil Cioran

If we understand many more things than other people, we owe it to our nervous system which is far more disturbed. One says 'I'm sad' but no one realizes what is the cause of his/her sadness; it may come from the stomach; or from a tune we have just listened to and which failed to impress us on the spot; or it may come from frustrated sexual desire ... It is not easy to see beyond symbolic forms of expression. People don't realize that you can negate the progress of humanity because your feet hurt. It is important to see beyond that which is given; and yet, once you see it, nothing matters. ~ Emil Cioran

I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen
and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other ... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies. ~ Emil Cioran

By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness ... I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory ... Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping ~ Emil Cioran

I was walking late one night along a tree-lined path; a chestnut fell at my feet. The noise it made as it burst, the resonance it provoked in me, and an upheaval out of all proportion to this insignificant event thrust me into miracle, into the rapture of the definitive, as if there were no more questions - only answers. I was drunk on a thousand unexpected discoveries, none of which I could make use of. ...
This is how I nearly reached the Supreme. But instead I went on with my walk. ~ Emil 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

Ambition is a drug that turns it's addicts into potential madmen. ~ 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

When modes of expression are worn out, art tends toward non-sense, toward a private and incomprehensible universe. An intelligible shudder, whether in painting, in music, or in poetry, strikes us, and rightly, as vulgar or out-of-date. The public will soon disappear; art will follow shortly.

A civilization which began with the cathedrals has to end with the hermeticism of schizophrenia. ~ Emil M. Cioran

We must beware of whatever insights we have into ourselves. Our self-knowledge annoys and paralyzes our daimon-this is where we should look for the reason Socrates wrote nothing. ~ Emil 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

We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job ... ~ Emil 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

To what temptations, to what extremities does lucidity lead! Shall we desert it now to take refuge in unconsciousness? Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher the poet's equal there. But our perspicacity cannot bear that such a marvel should endure, nor that inspiration should be brought within everyone's grasp; daylight strips us of the night's gifts. Only the madman enjoys the privilege of passing smoothly from a nocturnal to a daylight existence: no distinction between his dreams and his waking. He has renounced our reason, as the beggar has renounced our belongings. Both have found a way that leads beyond suffering and solved all our problems; hence they remain examples we cannot follow, saviors without adepts. ~ Emil Cioran

No one has lived so close to his skeleton as I have lived to mine: from which results an endless dialogue and certain truths which I manage neither to accept nor to reject. ~ Emil M. Cioran

Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness. ~ Emile M. Cioran

Deep inside, each man feels - and believes - himself to be immortal, even if he knows he will perish the next moment. We can understand everything, admit everything, realize everything, except our death, even when we ponder it unremittingly and even when we are resigned to it. ~ Emil M. Cioran

The Romans were not wiped out by the invasions of the barbarians, nor by the Christian virus, but by a more subtle evil, boredom. ~ Emil 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

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

Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart's drama and the negative meaning of history. ~ Emile M. Cioran

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

It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: In truth it is itself the quintessence of injustice. ~ Emil Cioran

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

A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect. ~ Emile M. Cioran

The dead center of existence: when it is all the same to you whether you read a newspaper article or think about God. ~ Emil Cioran

Impartiality is incompatible with the will to affirm oneself or quite simply with the will to exist. To acknowledge another's merits is an alarming symptom, an act against nature. ~ Emil Cioran

I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world. ~ Emil Cioran

If I reflect on any moment of my life, the most feverish or the most neutral, what remains? - and what difference is there now between them? Everything having become the same, without relief and without reality, it is when I felt nothing that I was closest to the truth, I mean to my present state in which I am recapitulating my experiences. What is the use of having felt anything at all? There is no "ecstasy" which either memory or imagination can resuscitate! ~ Emil M. Cioran

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

Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions. ~ Emil Cioran

A remark of my brother's apropos of the troubles and pains our mother endured: "Old age is nature's self-criticism. ~ Emil M. Cioran

Were we in the habit of looking beyond the specific content of ideologies and doctrines, we should see that to claim kinship with one of them rather than some other does not at all imply much expenditure of sagacity. Those following one party imagine they differ from those following another, whereas all, once they choose, join each other underneath, participate in one and the same nature, and vary only in appearance, by the mask they assume. ~ Emil M. Cioran

An unbalanced soul seeks equilibrium. I seek a constitutional form to gather my thoughts. I wish to form a flexible personality. I desire to be gentle and fluid of mind. I wish to summon hidden personal powers, but I lack the knowledge and wisdom to do so. I lack a cohesive unifying spirit. I have yet to claim the authenticity of my life. I failed to accept that what anyone else thinks of me would not stave off an inevitable death. I have not claimed a purpose for living. I have not found a basic truth that I can live and die supporting. I failed to exert the resolute will to become who I aspire to be. I rejected abstract concepts and failed to endorse the systematic reasoning of philosophical studies. I indulged in the type of obsessive excessive self-analysis, which leads to the brink of personal destruction through self-objectification and artificial triumphs. Echoing the words of Romanian philosopher and writer E.M. Cioran (1911-1995), 'I've invented nothing; I've simply been the secretary of my sensations. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

After each night we are emptier: our mysteries and our griefs have leaked away into our dreams. Thus sleep's labor not only diminishes the power of our thought, but even that of our secrets. ~ Emil Cioran

Every 'I' begins with a crack and a revelation. ~ Emil M. Cioran

If man is not ready to abdicate or to reconsider his case, it is because he has not yet drawn the final consequences of knowledge and of power. Convinced that his moment will come, that he will catch up with God and pass Him by, he clings - envious as he is - to the notion of evolution, as if the fact of advancing must necessarily bring him to the highest degree of perfection. Having sought to be other, he will end by being nothing; he is already nothing. Doubtless he is evolving, but against himself, to his cost, and toward a complexity which is ruining him. Becoming, progress: notions apparently tangential, actually divergent. True, everything changes, but rarely, if ever, for the better. Euphoric inflection of the original disease, of that false innocence which awakened in Adam a desire for the new, our faith in evolution, in the identity of becoming and progress, will collapse only when man, having reached the extremity of his distraction, having turned at last to the knowledge which leads to deliverance and not to power, will be in a position to offer an irrevocable no to his exploits and to his work. If he continues to clutch at them, he will doubtless enter upon the career of a ludicrous god or an obsolete animal, a solution as convenient as it is degrading, the ultimate stage of his infidelity to himself. Whatever choice he makes, and though he has not exhausted all the virtues of his failure, he has nonetheless fallen so low that it is hard to understand why he does ~ Emil M. Cioran

Freedom is the right to difference; being plurality, it postulates the dispersion of the absolute, its resolution into a dust of truths, equally justified and provisional. There is an underlying polytheism in liberal democracy (call it an unconscious polytheism); conversely, every authoritarian regime partakes of a disguised monotheism. ~ Emil Cioran

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

The mission of Everyman is to fulfill the lies he incarnates, to succeed in being no more than an exhaust illusion. ~ Emil 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

Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do. One so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it. ~ Emil Cioran

Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful. ~ Emile M. Cioran

Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that he alone pursues the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear. ~ Emil M. Cioran

Existence = Torment. The equation seems obvious to me, but not to one of my friends. How to convince him? I cannot lend him my sensations; yet only they would have the power to persuade him, to give him that additional dose of ill-being he has so insistently asked for all this time. ~ Emil M. Cioran

To tell the truth, I couldn't care less about the relativity of knowledge, simply because the world does not deserve to be known. ~ Emil Cioran

A philosopher is saved from mediocrity only by skepticism or mystique, these two forms of despair in the front of knowledge. Mystique is an escape from knowledge, and skepticism is knowledge without hope. In both kinds world is not a solution. ~ Emil M. Cioran

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

If we could understand and love the infinity of agonies which languish around us, all the lives which are hidden deaths, we should require as many hearts as there are suffering beings. ~ Emil M. Cioran

We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone 'happy', no greater flattery than to grant him a 'vein of melancholy' ... This is because gaiety is link to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone. ~ Emil Cioran

Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy. ~ Emil Cioran

For animals, life is all there is; for man, life is a question mark. An irreversible question mark, for man has never found, nor will ever find, any answers. Life not only has no meaning; it can never have one. ~ Emil Cioran

Born weary of being born, he chose to be a shade; when, then, did he live, and by the transgression of what birth? And if, living, he wore his shroud, by what miracle did he manage to die? ~ Emil M. Cioran

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

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

In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws. ~ Emile M. Cioran

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

The more power man acquires, the more vulnerable he becomes. What he must fear most is the moment when, creation entirely fleeced, he will celebrate his triumph, that fatal apotheosis, the victory he will not survive. ~ 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. ~ Emile M. Cioran

Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. ~ Emile M. Cioran

We had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy. ~ Emil Cioran

Tolerance cannot seduce the young. ~ Emil M. Cioran

The tired intellectual sums up the deformities and the vices of a world adrift. He does not act, he suffers; if he favors the notion of tolerance, he does not find in it the stimulant he needs. Tyranny furnishes that, as do the doctrines of which it is the outcome. If he is the first of its victims, he will not complain: only the strength that grinds him into the dust seduces him. To want to be free is to want to be oneself; but he is tired of being himself, of blazing a trail into uncertainty, of stumbling through truths. "Bind me with the chains of Illusion," he sighs, even as he says farewell to the peregrinations of Knowledge. Thus he will fling himself, eyes closed, into any mythology which will assure him the protection and the peace of the yoke. Declining the honor of assuming his own anxieties, he will engage in enterprises from which he anticipates sensations he could not derive from himself, so that the excesses of his lassitude will confirm the tyrannies. Churches, ideologies, police - seek out their origin in the horror he feels for his own lucidity, rather than in the stupidity of the masses. This weakling transforms himself, in the name of a know-nothing utopia, into a gravedigger of the intellect; convinced of doing something useful, he prostitutes Pascal's old "abêtissezvous," the Solitary's tragic device.
A routed iconoclast, disillusioned with paradox and provocation, in search of impersonality and routine, half prostrated, ripe for the stereotype, the ~ Emil M. Cioran

If we consider closely our so-called generous actions, there is none which, from some aspect, is not blameworthy an even harmful, so that we come to regret having performed it - so that we must choose, finally, between abstention and remorse. ~ 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

Even when they desert hell, men do so only to reconstruct it elsewhere. ~ Emil Cioran

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

I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions. ~ Emil Cioran

I long to be free - desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free. ~ Emil Cioran

Nothing more to pursue, except the pursuit of nothing. ~ Emil Cioran

We do not adopt a belief because it is true (they are all true), but because some obscure power impels us to do so. When this power leaves us, we suffer prostration and collapse, a tete-a-tete with what is left of ourselves. ~ Emil Cioran

My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out. I am a fossil dating from the beginning of the world: not all of its elements have completely crystallized, and initial chaos still shows through. I am absolute contradiction, climax of antinomies, the last limit of tension; in me anything is possible, for I am he who at the supreme moment, in front of absolute nothingness, will laugh. ~ Emil Cioran

For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened. ...
No sooner are they open than the drama beings. To look without understanding - that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much. ... ~ Emil Cioran

Truth remains hidden to the man filled with desire and hatred" (Buddha)…. Which is to say, to every man alive. ~ Emil M. Cioran

Though we may prefer ourselves to the universe, we nonetheless loathe ourselves much more than we suspect. If the wise man is so rare a phenomenon, it is because he seems unshaken by the aversion which, like all beings, he must feel for himself. ~ Emil Cioran

Every work turns against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action. Destruction awaits anyone who, answering to his vocation and fulfilling it, exerts himself within history; only the man who sacrifices every gift and talent escapes: released from his humanity, he may lodge himself in Being. ( ... ) One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse. ~ Emil Cioran

There is no limit-disappointment. ~ Emil 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

In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary. ~ Emile M. Cioran

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism. ~ Emile M. Cioran

His sterility was infinite: it partook of ecstasy. ~ Emil Cioran

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

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

Nothing desiccates a mind so much as its repugnance to conceive obscure ideas. ~ Emil Cioran