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Emil M. Cioran: 1062 quotes388 likes

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran

The New Gods (1969)

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

Emil M. Cioran

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“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)

“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

“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)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran

Tears and Saints (1937)

“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)

“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?”

Emil M. Cioran

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“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 M. Cioran

The New Gods (1969)

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

Emil M. Cioran

The New Gods (1969)

“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)

“"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

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

Emil M. Cioran

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

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

Emil M. Cioran

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

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

Emil M. Cioran

The Temptation to Exist (1956)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran

The New Gods (1969)