Emil M. Cioran: Quotes about the world

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

“One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.”

Emil M. Cioran

“How can you know if you are in the truth? The criterion is simple enough: if others make a vacuum around you, there is not a doubt in the world that you are closer to the essential than they are.”

Emil M. Cioran

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it. Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?”

Emil M. Cioran

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history — greater than the fall of empires — I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.”

Emil M. Cioran

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.”

Emil M. Cioran

Source: On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.”

Emil M. Cioran

Source: On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.”

Emil M. Cioran

“How I wish I didn't know anything about myself and this world!”

Emil M. Cioran

Source: On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“For a long while I have lived with the notion that I was the most normal being that ever existed. This notion gave me the taste, even the passion for being unproductive: what was the use of being prized in a world inhabited by madmen, a world mired in mania and stupidity? For whom was one to bother, and to what end? It remains to be seen if I have quite freed myself from this certitude, salvation in the absolute, ruin in the immediate.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“Vague a l'ame — melancholy yearning for the end of the world.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“I don't understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn't it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?”

Emil M. Cioran

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“Facing a landscape annihilated by the light, to remain serene supposes a temper I do not have. The sun is my purveyor of black thoughts; and summer the season when I have always reconsidered my relations with this world and with myself, to the greatest prejudice of both.”

Emil M. Cioran

The New Gods (1969)

“The skeptic is the least mysterious man in the world, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world.”

Emil M. Cioran

The New Gods (1969)

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

Emil M. Cioran

The Book of Delusions (1936)

“To tell the truth, I couldn't care less about the relativity of knowledge, simply because the world does not deserve to be known.”

Emil M. Cioran

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

“You have dreamed of setting the world ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light up a single one!”

Emil M. Cioran

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“To detach yourself elegantly from the world; to give contour and grace to sadness; a solitude in style; a walk that gives cadence to memories; stepping towards the intangible; with the breath in the trembling margins of things; the past reborn in the overflow of fragrances; the smell, through which we conquer time; the contour of the invisible things; the forms of the immaterial; to deepen yourself in the intangible; to touch the world airborne by smell; aerial dialogue and gliding dissolution; to bathe in your own reflecting fragmentation…”

Emil M. Cioran

The Book of Delusions (1936)