Emil M. Cioran: Quotes about life

Emil M. Cioran was Romanian philosopher and essayist. Explore interesting quotes on life.
Emil M. Cioran: 1062 quotes388 likes

“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)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran

Tears and Saints (1937)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran

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)

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

Emil M. Cioran

The Book of Delusions (1936)

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

Emil M. Cioran

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion.”

Emil M. Cioran

Tears and Saints (1937)

“Knowledge is the plague of life, and consciousness, an open wound in its heart.”

Emil M. Cioran

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“The advantage of meditating upon life and death is being able to say anything at all about them.”

Emil M. Cioran

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.”

Emil M. Cioran

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death's prisoner.”

Emil M. Cioran

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don't know, and we don't really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.”

Emil M. Cioran

Tears and Saints (1937)

“"What is truth?" is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to "How to endure life?" And even this one pales beside the next: "How to endure oneself?" - That is the crucial question in which no one is in a position to give us an answer.”

Emil M. Cioran

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

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

Emil M. Cioran

The Temptation to Exist (1956)

“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)

“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)

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran

The Book of Delusions (1936)

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

Emil M. Cioran

Tears and Saints (1937)

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

Emil M. Cioran

Drawn and Quartered (1983)