Top 300 Emil Cioran Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

54. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

56. “What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.”

— Emil Cioran

57. “A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.”

— Emil Cioran

58. “By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing; but instead of nonchalantly promenading our own corruption, we exude our sweat and grow winded upon the fetid air.”

— Emil Cioran

59. “One doesn’t live in a country, one lives in a language.”

— Emil Cioran

60. “The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.”

— Emil Cioran

61. “I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.”

— Emil Cioran

62. “Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.”

— Emil Cioran

63. “Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.”

— Emil Cioran

64. “The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.”

— Emil Cioran

65. “I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.”

— Emil Cioran

66. “History proves nothing because it contains everything.”

— Emil Cioran

67. “Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.”

— Emil Cioran

68. “Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy.”

— Emil Cioran

69. “An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.”

— Emil Cioran

70. “Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.”

— Emil Cioran

71. “If you’re unlucky enough not to have alcoholic parents, it takes you a whole lifetime of intoxication to overcome the dead weight of their virtues.”

— Emil Cioran

72. “To have committed every crime but that of being a father.”

— Emil Cioran

73. “Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.”

— Emil Cioran

74. “Existing is plagiarism.”

— Emil Cioran

75. “If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.”

— Emil Cioran

76. “True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.”

— Emil Cioran

77. “He who hates himself is not humble.”

— Emil Cioran

78. “The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

80. “Man is a robot with defects.”

— Emil Cioran

81. “What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?”

— Emil Cioran

82. “Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves.”

— Emil Cioran

83. “Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.”

— Emil Cioran

84. “The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?”

— Emil Cioran

85. “Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.”

— Emil Cioran

86. “All people see fires, storms, explosions, or landscapes; but how many feel the flames, the lightnings, the whirlwinds, or the harmony? How many have an inner beauty that tinges their melancholy?”

— Emil Cioran

87. “I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.”

— Emil Cioran

88. “To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell.”

— Emil Cioran

89. “I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside.”

— Emil Cioran

90. “A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.”

— Emil Cioran

91. “Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.”

— Emil Cioran

92. “Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.”

— Emil Cioran

93. “Tyrants are always assassinated too late. That is their great excuse.”

— Emil Cioran

94. “I have always struggled, with the sole intention of ceasing to struggle. Result: zero.”

— Emil Cioran

95. “The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.”

— Emil Cioran

96. “Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.”

— Emil Cioran

97. “We inhabit a language rather than a country.”

— Emil Cioran

98. “We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.”

— Emil Cioran

99. “We derive our vitality from our store of madness.”

— Emil Cioran

100. “Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?”

— Emil Cioran