Emil M. Cioran: Trending quotes

“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.”

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.”

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“We suffer: the external world begins to exist...; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves — that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“If I used to ask myself, over a coffin, "what good did it do the occupant to be born?" I now put the same question about anyone alive.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“To think is to run after insecurity, to be demoralized for grandiose trifles, to immure oneself in abstractions with a martyr's avidity, to hunt up complications the way others pursue collapse or gain. The thinker is by definition keen for torment.”

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“The real, the unique misfortune: to see the light of day. A disaster which dates back to aggressiveness, to the seed of expansion and rage within origins, to the tendency to the worst which first shook them up.”

“Buddhism calls anger "corruption of the mind," Manicheism "root of the tree of death." I know this, but what good does it do me to know?”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It's not easy to be on the wrong foot with life”

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“History shows that the thinkers who mounted on the top of the ladder of questions, who set their foot on the last rung, that of the absurd, have bequeathed to posterity only an example of sterility.”

The Book of Delusions (1936)

“I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.”

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“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 aesthetic 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?”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying?”

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“"What's wrong - what's the matter with you?" Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for…”

that void is consciousness itself.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)