Top 300 Emil Cioran Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

154. “You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.”

— Emil Cioran

155. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

163. “I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

165. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

168. “An existence transfigured by failure.”

— Emil Cioran

169. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

176. “I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

178. “What is pity but the vice of kindness.”

— Emil Cioran

179. “How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

181. “I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

183. “A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.”

— Emil Cioran

184. “Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.”

— Emil Cioran

185. “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

186. “We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

188. “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

189. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

191. “A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice.”

— Emil Cioran

192. “What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.”

— Emil Cioran

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193. “For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

196. “Maniacs of Procreation, bipeds with devalued faces, we have lost all appeal for each other.”

— Emil Cioran

197. “Vague a l’ame – melancholy yearning for the end of the world.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

199. “How easy it is to be “deep”: all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.”

— Emil Cioran

200. “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