Emil M. Cioran Quotes
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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

Emil M. Cioran: 531 quotes389 likes

Emil M. Cioran Quotes

“Heroes abound at the dawn of civilizations, during pre-Homeric and Gothic epochs, when people, not having yet experienced spiritual torture, satisfy their thirst for renunciation through a derivative: heroism.”

Tears and Saints (1937)

“We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false.”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

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

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

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

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

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

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“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.”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“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.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

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

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

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

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“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.”

The Temptation to Exist (1956)

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

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“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.”

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“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.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“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.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“History proves nothing because it contains everything.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

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

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

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

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“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.”

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“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.”

The Temptation to Exist (1956)

“Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“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.”

The New Gods (1969)

“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.”

Tears and Saints (1937)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“Existing is plagiarism.”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“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.
The Book of Delusions (1936)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

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

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“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.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“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.”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

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

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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“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?”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

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 Book of Delusions (1936)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

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

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“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?”

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

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

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

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

“"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…”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

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