Top 300 Emil Cioran Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.”

— Emil Cioran

152. “A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

158. “Negation is the mind’s first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.”

— Emil Cioran

159. “We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose dying: Everything!”

— Emil Cioran

160. “A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation’s paradise and its tomb.”

— Emil Cioran

161. “That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.”

— Emil Cioran

162. “All great ideas should be followed by an exclamation mark – a warning signal similar to the skull and crossbones drawn on high-voltage transformers.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

164. “The universal view melts things into a blur.”

— Emil Cioran

165. “He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.”

— Emil Cioran

166. “Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.”

— Emil Cioran

167. “No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity;––for thoughts, there is always time; life has its time; there is no thought that comes too late; any desire can become a regret.”

— Emil Cioran

168. “An existence transfigured by failure.”

— Emil Cioran

169. “Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.”

— Emil Cioran

170. “A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

172. “Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

174. “When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.”

— Emil Cioran

175. “To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life.”

— Emil Cioran

176. “The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.”

— Emil Cioran

177. “If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: “I want to be praised.””

— Emil Cioran

178. “Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.”

— Emil Cioran

179. “What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?”

— Emil Cioran

180. “To Foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by the hatred smothered within.”

— Emil Cioran

181. “The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.”

— Emil Cioran

182. “We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.”

— Emil Cioran

183. “Every thought should recall the ruin of a smile.”

— Emil Cioran

184. “God – a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.”

— Emil Cioran

185. “What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?”

— Emil Cioran

186. “Just as ecstasy purifies you of the particular and the contingent, leaving nothing except light and darkness, so insomnia kills off the multiplicity and diversity of the world, leaving you prey to your private obsessions.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

188. “Man started out on the wrong foot. The misadventure in paradise was the first consequence. The rest had to follow.”

— Emil Cioran

189. “A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It’s not easy to be on the wrong foot with life.”

— Emil Cioran

190. “By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.”

— Emil Cioran

191. “The curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing now but mask and ghost.”

— Emil Cioran

192. “What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you – what a revelation.”

— Emil Cioran

193. “Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.”

— Emil Cioran

194. “Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.”

— Emil Cioran

195. “All that shimmers on the surface of the world, all that we call interesting, is the fruit of ignorance and inebriation.”

— Emil Cioran

196. “Every profound dissatisfaction is of a religious nature: our failures derive from our incapacity to conceive of paradise and to aspire to it, as our discomforts from the fragility of our relations with the absolute.”

— Emil Cioran

197. “The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.”

— Emil Cioran

198. “When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.”

— Emil Cioran

199. “History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.”

— Emil Cioran

200. “Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.”

— Emil Cioran