Emil M. Cioran Quotes

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“You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness.”

“Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream.”

“Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral…”

“I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass — which is better than trying to fill them.”

“Glory — once achieved, what is it worth?”

“Nothing deserves to be undone, doubtless because nothing deserved to be done.”

“That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.”

“We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface…”

“Skepticism is an exercise in defascination.”

“Creation is in fact a fault, man's famous sin thereby appearing as a minor version of a much graver one. What are we guilty of, except of having followed, more or less slavishly, the Creator's example? Easy to recognize in ourselves the fatality which was His: not for nothing have we issued from the hands of a wicked and woebegone god, a god accursed.”

“To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.”

“The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.”

“Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world.”

“What place do we occupy in the "universe"? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we are evidently so insignificant? Once we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.”

“The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy.”

“Tolerance — the function of an extinguished ardor — tolerance cannot seduce the young.”

“God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.”

“When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.”

“Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?”

“Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.”

“Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.”

“The wrinkles of a nation are as visible as those of an individual.”

“One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.”

“To have grazed every form of failure, including success.”

“Only the idiot is equipped to breathe.”

“Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.”

“It has been a long time since philosophers have read men's souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.”

“By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness.... I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory.... Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.”

“As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad.”

“We had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy.”

“Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.”

“Boredom is a larval anxiety; depression, a dreamy hatred.”

“To repeat to yourself a thousand times a day: 'Nothing on Earth has any worth,' to keep finding yourself at the same point, to circle stupidly as a top, eternally…”

“Detachment from the world as an attachment to the ego… Who can realize the detachment in which you are as far away from yourself as you are from the world?”

“No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity; — for thoughts, there is always time; life has its time; there is no thought that comes too late; any desire can become a regret.”

“Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.”

“Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do. One so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it.”

“All that is Life in me urges me to give up God.”

“It makes no sense to say that death is the goal of life, but what else is there to say?”

“Who does not believe in Fate proves that he has not lived.”

“I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if, creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity. Yet in a less assured mood, birth seems a calamity I would be miserable not having known.”

“There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.”

“Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn't deserve to be known.”

“To hope is to contradict the future.”

“The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools.”

“Truths begin by a conflict with the police — and end by calling them in.”

“Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life.”

“Everyone is mistaken, everyone lives in illusion. At best, we can admit a scale of fictions, a hierarchy of unrealities, giving preference to one rather than to another; but to choose, no, definitely not that…”

“Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?”