Top 300 Emil Cioran Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

203. “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

204. “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

205. “I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

210. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

215. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

232. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

239. “Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

244. “If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an ‘I’ without shame.”

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran