Top 300 Emil Cioran Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

108. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

112. “To read is to let someone else work for you – the most delicate form of exploitation.”

— Emil Cioran

113. “Society: an inferno of saviors!”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

115. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

120. “I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity.”

— Emil Cioran

121. “There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.”

— Emil Cioran

122. “The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.”

— Emil Cioran

123. “We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.”

— Emil Cioran

124. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

126. “Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

129. “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

130. “We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

132. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

135. “By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

138. “Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.”

— Emil Cioran

139. “We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

143. “Normal people have nothing to forget.”

— Emil Cioran

144. “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

145. “Life inspires more dread than death – it is life which is the great unknown.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

148. “A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran