Emil M. Cioran Quotes

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“To Live signifies to believe and hope — to lie and to lie to oneself.”

“The worst is not ennui nor despair but their encounter, their collision. To be crushed between the two!”

“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.”

“One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland — and no other.”

“We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.”

“When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment.”

“Even in childhood I watched the hours flow, independent of any reference, any action, any event, the disjunction of time from what was not itself, its autonomous existence, its special status, its empire, its tyranny. I remember quite clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts. Time was coming unstuck from being — at my expense.”

“There is no false sensation.”

“To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze.”

“To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.”

“To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion.”

“I don't understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn't it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?”

“To think that so many have succeeded in dying!”

“If there was a God of sorrow, he would grow black heavy wings, to soar not for the skies, but for inferno.”

“Facing a landscape annihilated by the light, to remain serene supposes a temper I do not have. The sun is my purveyor of black thoughts; and summer the season when I have always reconsidered my relations with this world and with myself, to the greatest prejudice of both.”

“If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!”

“Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.”

“The Creation was the first act of sabotage.”

“"You really should come to the house - one of these days we might die without having seen each other again." - "Since we have to die in any case, what's the use of seeing each other again?"”

“The only subversive mind is the one that questions the obligation to exist; all the others, the anarchist at the top of the list, compromise with the established order.”

“Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.”

“No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.”

“This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.”

“On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I."”

“Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.”

“Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.”

“The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.”

“If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.”

“Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!”

“If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.”

“Thought is as much a lie as love or faith.”

“In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart. Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.”

“But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle...”

“The skeptic is the least mysterious man in the world, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world.”

“To suffer is to produce knowledge.”

“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.”

“To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!”

“"I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside." This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works on introspection.”

“In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left…with a foolish grin.”

“A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints.”

“How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.”

“No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.”

“All morning, I did nothing but repeat: "Man is an abyss, man is an abyss." - I could not, alas, find anything better.”

“To make more plans than an explorer or a crook, yet to be infected at the will's very root.”

“Reality is a creation of our excesses.”

“Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.”

“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.”

“I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.”

“As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.”