Emil M. Cioran quotes

„To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously.“

—  Emil M. Cioran

The Book of Delusions (1936)

„To suffer is to produce knowledge.“

—  Emil M. Cioran

The New Gods (1969)

„Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.“

—  Emil M. Cioran

„This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique — and insignificant.“

—  Emil M. Cioran, book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born

„We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job…“

—  Emil M. Cioran

„Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle…“

—  Emil M. Cioran, book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

„But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle...“

—  Emil M. Cioran, book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

„The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous.“

—  Emil M. Cioran

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

„Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands?“

—  Emil M. Cioran

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

„It is not by genius, it is by suffering, and suffering alone, that one ceases to be a marionette.“

—  Emil M. Cioran

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

„At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.“

—  Emil M. Cioran, book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

„I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action — mother of all vices — I am the cause of no one's suffering.“

—  Emil M. Cioran, book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

„My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.“

—  Emil M. Cioran, book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

„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.“

—  Emil M. Cioran

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

„On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I."“

—  Emil M. Cioran

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

„The state of health is a state of nonsensation, even of nonreality. As soon as we cease to suffer, we cease to exist.“

—  Emil M. Cioran

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

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

—  Emil M. Cioran

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

„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)

„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.“

—  Emil M. Cioran

All Gall Is Divided (1952)