Top 300 Emil Cioran Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “At this very moment, I am suffering – as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

103. “If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.”

— Emil Cioran

104. “It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.”

— Emil Cioran

105. “Everything is pathology, except for indifference.”

— Emil Cioran

106. “If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

108. “What strangely enchanted tunes gush forth during those sleepless nights!”

— Emil Cioran

109. “We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.”

— Emil Cioran

110. “Society: an inferno of saviors!”

— Emil Cioran

111. “To accomplish nothing and die of the strain.”

— Emil Cioran

112. “Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.”

— Emil Cioran

113. “In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.”

— Emil Cioran

114. “Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught.”

— Emil Cioran

115. “All philosophers should end their days at Pythia’s feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.”

— Emil Cioran

116. “Existing is plagiarism.”

— Emil Cioran

117. “Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.”

— Emil Cioran

118. “Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.”

— Emil Cioran

119. “Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.”

— Emil Cioran

120. “What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.”

— Emil Cioran

121. “Tears do not burn except in solitude.”

— Emil Cioran

122. “No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.”

— Emil Cioran

123. “Try to be free: you will die of hunger.”

— Emil Cioran

124. “I have no nationality – the best possible status for an intellectual.”

— Emil Cioran

125. “Normal people have nothing to forget.”

— Emil Cioran

126. “You are done for – a living dead man – not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.”

— Emil Cioran

127. “Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.”

— Emil Cioran

128. “The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.”

— Emil Cioran

129. “Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.”

— Emil Cioran

130. “To live entirely without a goal! I have glimpsed this state, and have often attained it, without managing to remain there: I am too weak for such happiness.”

— Emil Cioran

131. “The amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its profundity.”

— Emil Cioran

132. “Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you’d prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone.”

— Emil Cioran

133. “Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.”

— Emil Cioran

134. “No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.”

— Emil Cioran

135. “A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.”

— Emil Cioran

136. “Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.”

— Emil Cioran

137. “However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.”

— Emil Cioran

138. “By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?”

— Emil Cioran

139. “Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.”

— Emil Cioran

140. “I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass – which is better than trying to fill them.”

— Emil Cioran

141. “No human beings are more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief.”

— Emil Cioran

142. “To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.”

— Emil Cioran

143. “Glory – once achieved, what is it worth?”

— Emil Cioran

144. “Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.”

— Emil Cioran

145. “Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.”

— Emil Cioran

146. “One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.”

— Emil Cioran

147. “Jealousy – that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.”

— Emil Cioran

148. “We are all geniuses when we dream.”

— Emil Cioran

149. “To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.”

— Emil Cioran

150. “All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.”

— Emil Cioran