Top 300 Emil Cioran Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A book is a suicide postponed.”

— Emil Cioran

Featured in: Depression Quotes

2. “The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live – moreover, the only one.”

— Emil Cioran

Featured in: Sad Quotes About Life, Existentialism Quotes, Quotes About Facts

3. “Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one’s reach.”

— Emil Cioran

4. “Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.”

— Emil Cioran

5. “I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person.”

— Emil Cioran

Featured in: Country Quotes

6. “Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.”

— Emil Cioran

7. “We cannot be normal and alive at the same time.”

— Emil Cioran

8. “Consciousness is nature’s nightmare.”

— Emil Cioran

9. “There is no limit to suffering.”

— Emil Cioran

10. “Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”

— Emil Cioran

11. “I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.”

— Emil Cioran

12. “The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.”

— Emil Cioran

13. “Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.”

— Emil Cioran

14. “Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.”

— Emil Cioran

15. “I’m simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?”

— Emil Cioran

16. “My mission is to kill time, and time’s to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.”

— Emil Cioran

17. “The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.”

— Emil Cioran

18. “I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.”

— Emil Cioran

19. “Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?”

— Emil Cioran

20. “When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, “What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act.” And they do calm down.”

— Emil Cioran

21. “Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.”

— Emil Cioran

22. “No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.”

— Emil Cioran

23. “The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable.”

— Emil Cioran

24. “What music appeals to in us it is difficult to know; what we do know is that music reaches a zone so deep that madness itself cannot penetrate there.”

— Emil Cioran

25. “It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”

— Emil Cioran

26. “Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.”

— Emil Cioran

27. “What are you waiting for in order to give up?”

— Emil Cioran

28. “I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I’d have killed myself right away.”

— Emil Cioran

29. “We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.”

— Emil Cioran

30. “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 Cioran

31. “The Art of Love: knowing how to combine the temperament of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone.”

— Emil Cioran

32. “Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy!”

— Emil Cioran

33. “Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.”

— Emil Cioran

34. “One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland – and no other.”

— Emil Cioran

Featured in: Country Quotes

35. “If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.”

— Emil Cioran

36. “Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret.”

— Emil Cioran

37. “If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.”

— Emil Cioran

38. “No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.”

— Emil Cioran

39. “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 Cioran

40. “Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.”

— Emil Cioran

41. “Trees are massacred, houses go up – faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.”

— Emil Cioran

42. “As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.”

— Emil Cioran

43. “Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.”

— Emil Cioran

44. “Our first intuitions are the true ones.”

— Emil Cioran

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

45. “Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher’s the poet’s equal there.”

— Emil Cioran

46. “What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name – and moving on.”

— Emil Cioran

47. “Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

49. “After having struggled madly to solve all problems, after having suffered on the heights of despair, in the supreme hour of revelation, you will find that the only answer, the only reality, is silence.”

— Emil Cioran

50. “Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.”

— Emil Cioran