Emil M. Cioran Quotes

Emil 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, and frequently engages with issues of suffering, decay, and nihilism. Among his best-known works are On the Heights of Despair and The Trouble with Being Born . Cioran's first French book, A Short History of Decay, was awarded the prestigious Rivarol Prize in 1950. The Latin Quarter of Paris was his permanent residence and he lived much of his life in isolation with his partner Simone Boué. Wikipedia

✵ 8. April 1911 – 20. June 1995

Emil M. Cioran photo

Works

The Trouble With Being Born

Emil M. Cioran

A Short History of Decay

Emil M. Cioran

History and Utopia

Emil M. Cioran

The Trouble With Being Born

Emil M. Cioran

A Short History of Decay

Emil M. Cioran

History and Utopia

Emil M. Cioran

Emil M. Cioran: 531 quotes388 likes

Famous Emil M. Cioran Quotes

“When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die. - Didn't you know that's how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness.”

Tears and Saints (1937)

“Philosophy offers an antidote to melancholy. And many still believe in the depth of philosophy!”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man.”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“What are you waiting for in order to give up?”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Emil M. Cioran Quotes about life

“I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“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.”

Tears and Saints (1937)

“In theory, it matters little to me whether I live as whether I die; in practice, I am lacerated by every anxiety which opens an abyss between life and death.”

The New Gods (1969)

“Only those are happy who never think or, rather, who only think about life's bare necessities, and to think about such things means not to think at all. True thinking resembles a demon who muddies the spring of life or a sickness which corrupts its roots. To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life, to leave behind you, as symbols of your life's drama, a trail of smoke and blood — all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you.”

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.”

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

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

Emil M. Cioran Quotes about the world

“One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.”

“How can you know if you are in the truth? The criterion is simple enough: if others make a vacuum around you, there is not a doubt in the world that you are closer to the essential than they are.”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it. Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history — greater than the fall of empires — I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.”

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.”

Source: On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“How I wish I didn't know anything about myself and this world!”

Source: On the Heights of Despair (1934)

Emil M. Cioran: Trending quotes

“Self-knowledge — the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“A man does not kill himself, as is commonly supposed, in a fit of madness but rather in a fit of unendurable lucidity, in a paroxysm which may, if so desired, be identified with madness; for an excessive perspicacity, carried to the limit and of which one longs to be rid at all costs, exceeds the context of reason.”

The New Gods (1969)

Emil M. Cioran Quotes

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

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born

“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.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“The farther men get from God, the farther they advance into the knowledge of religions.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“A book is a suicide postponed.”

“There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another.”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“"What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself."”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born

“To have committed every crime but that of being a father.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born

“Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.”

The New Gods (1969)

“Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.”

The Temptation to Exist (1956)

“Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence.”

The New Gods (1969)

“Only optimists commit suicide, the optimists who can no longer be... optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”

Source: Tears and Saints (1937)

“We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born

“Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born

“There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born

“Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“Society: an inferno of saviors!”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.”

The New Gods (1969)

“One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“In order to conceive, and to steep ourselves in, unreality, we must have it constantly present to our minds. The day we feel it, see it, everything becomes unreal, except that unreality which alone makes existence tolerable.”

The New Gods (1969)

“After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“But, braggart demons, we postpone our end: how could we renounce the display of our freedom, the show of our pride?”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

Source: A Short History of Decay (1949)

“The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“Doutbless, revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim, or else we are tangled in the subtleties of remorse; so vengeance too has its venom, though it comes closer to what we are, to what we feel, to the very law of the self; it is also healthier than magnanimity. The Furies were held to antedate the gods, Zeus included. Vengeance before Divinity! This is the Major intuition of ancient mythology.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

p. 70. https://books.google.com/books?id=5DuCDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT70 <br class="br">History and Utopia (1960)

“Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

Source: A Short History of Decay (1949)

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

“Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.”

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

Source: The New Gods (1969)

“Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.”

Source: All Gall Is Divided: Aphorisms

“Tears do not burn except in solitude.”

Source: On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“If we could truly see ourselves the way others see us we'd disappear on the spot.”

“If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.”

Source: On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.”

Source: On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.”

Source: On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“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.”

“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.”

Source: On the Heights of Despair (1934)
Context: Everything is possible, and yet nothing is. All is permitted, and yet again, nothing. 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’s all the same whether you cry or remain silent. There is an explanation for everything, and yet there is none. Everything is both real and unreal, normal and absurd, splendid and insipid. There is nothing worth more than anything else, nor any idea better than any other. Why grow sad from one’s sadness and delight in one’s joy? What does it matter whether our tears come from pleasure or pain? Love your unhappiness and hate your happiness, mix everything up, scramble it all! Be a snowflake dancing in the air, a flower floating downstream! Have courage when you don’t need to, and be a coward when you must be brave! Who knows? You may still be a winner! And if you lose, does it really matter? Is there anything to win in this world? All gain is loss, all loss is gain. Why always expect a definite stance, clear ideas, meaningful words? I feel as if I should spout fire in response to all the questions which were ever put, or not put, to me.

“The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.”

Source: The Trouble with Being Born

“"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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born

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

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

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“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."”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

And they do calm down.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born

“Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are.”

Variant: Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are.
Source: Tears and Saints (1937)

“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.”

Source: Tears and Saints (1937)

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