Top 300 Emil Cioran Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

54. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

56. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

62. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

66. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

69. “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

70. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

73. “Man is a robot with defects.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

88. “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

89. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

91. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

94. “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

95. “The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.”

— Emil Cioran

96. “Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

99. “There is only one thing worse than boredom, and that is the fear of boredom.”

— Emil Cioran

100. “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