Top 300 Emil Cioran Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job...”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

203. “Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.”

— Emil Cioran

204. “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

205. “Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.”

— Emil Cioran

206. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

208. “Once you see that everything is unreal, you can’t see why you should bother to prove it.”

— Emil Cioran

209. “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

210. “Lucidity’s task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.”

— Emil Cioran

211. “We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.”

— Emil Cioran

212. “A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.”

— Emil Cioran

213. “Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.”

— Emil Cioran

214. “The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.”

— Emil Cioran

215. “No one can keep his griefs in their prime; they use themselves up.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

217. “To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.”

— Emil Cioran

218. “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

219. “Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.”

— Emil Cioran

220. “As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.”

— Emil Cioran

221. “One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.”

— Emil Cioran

222. “Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death!”

— Emil Cioran

223. “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

224. “If a man has not, by the time he is thirty, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism – I don’t know whether he is to be admired or scorned, regarded as a saint or a corpse.”

— Emil Cioran

225. “Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.”

— Emil Cioran

226. “Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent -unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it -we perpetuate it within ourselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude.”

— Emil Cioran

227. “My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.”

— Emil Cioran

228. “To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall?”

— Emil Cioran

229. “Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.”

— Emil Cioran

230. “A book has to dig through the wounds, more, it has cause a new one, a book it has to be dangerous.”

— Emil Cioran

231. “Tolerance – the function of an extinguished ardor – tolerance cannot seduce the young.”

— Emil Cioran

232. “Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.”

— Emil Cioran

233. “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

234. “True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one’s victories as defeats.”

— Emil Cioran

235. “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

236. “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

237. “Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.”

— Emil Cioran

238. “Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.”

— Emil Cioran

239. “What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.”

— Emil Cioran

240. “Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor and revolt, a perplexity on fire.”

— Emil Cioran

241. “Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.”

— Emil Cioran

242. “Humanity adores only those who cause it to perish.”

— Emil Cioran

243. “To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel you are consubstantial with that future.”

— Emil Cioran

244. “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

245. “I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.”

— Emil Cioran

246. “Discretion is deadly to genius; ruinous to talent.”

— Emil Cioran

247. “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

248. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

250. “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