Top 300 Emil Cioran Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “A book is a suicide postponed.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

Featured in: 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. “Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

Featured in: Country Quotes

8. “Consciousness is nature’s nightmare.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

10. “There is no limit to suffering.”

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

19. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

21. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

23. “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

24. “Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

26. “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

27. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

33. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

37. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

43. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

45. “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

46. “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 Cioran

47. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

50. “Read day and night, devour books – these sleeping pills – not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.”

— Emil Cioran