Emil M. Cioran Quotes

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“Life inspires more dread than death — it is life which is the great unknown.”

“Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.”

“The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so…”

“What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.”

“I want to proclaim a truth that would forever exile me from among the living. I know only the conditions but not the words that would allow me to formulate it.”

“Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.”

“What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!”

“Awareness of time: assault on time...”

“A minimum of unconsciousness is necessary if one wants to stay inside history. To act is one thing; to know one is acting is another. When lucidity invests the action, insinuates itself into it, action is undone, and with it, prejudice, whose function consists, precisely, in subordinating, in enslaving consciousness to action. The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depths. No man concerned with his equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.”

“Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.”

“I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.”

“Compared to the refined culture of sclerotic forms and frames, which mask everything, the lyrical mode is utterly barbarian in its expression. Its value resides precisely in its savage quality: it is only blood, sincerity, and fire.”

“There exists, I grant you, a clinical depression, upon which certain remedies occasionally have effect; but there exists another kind, a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself.”

“The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world.”

“History proves nothing because it contains everything.”

“I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.”

“In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.”

“I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to empty abstraction.”

“If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.”

“Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.”

“It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should avoid simulacra and even "realities"; you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a "solitary elephant.”

“It is difficult, it is impossible to believe that the Good Lord—“Our Father”—had a hand in the scandal of creation. Everything suggests that He took no part in it, that it proceeds from a god without scruples, a feculent god. Goodness does not create, lacking imagination; it takes imagination to put together a world, however botched. At the very least, there must be a mixture of good and evil in order to produce an action or a work.”

“From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.”

“This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears.”

“Existing is plagiarism.”

“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.”

“We say: he has no talent, only tone. But tone is precisely what cannot be invented — we're born with it. Tone is an inherited grace, the privilege some of us have of making our organic pulsations felt — tone is more than talent, it is its essence.”

“Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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?”

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

“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.”

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

“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?”

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

“"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…”

“I seem to myself, among civilised men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.”

“In a single second we do away with all seconds; God himself could not do as much.”