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

“It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

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

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“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…”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

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

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“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…”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“Skepticism is an exercise in defascination.”

The New Gods (1969)

“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.”

The New Gods (1969)

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

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

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

The Temptation to Exist (1956)

“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.”

Tears and Saints (1937)

“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 New Gods (1969)

“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.”

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

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

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

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

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

The New Gods (1969)

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

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

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

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

The Temptation to Exist (1956)

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

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

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

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“Only the idiot is equipped to breathe.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

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

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)
Variant: 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.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“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…”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“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?”

The Book of Delusions (1936)

“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.”

The Book of Delusions (1936)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

Tears and Saints (1937)

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

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

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

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

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

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“To hope is to contradict the future.”

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

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

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“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…”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

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