Top 300 Emil Cioran Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 6 of 7

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

— Emil Cioran

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

— Emil Cioran

253. “The only free mind is one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.”

— Emil Cioran

254. “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

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

— Emil Cioran

256. “In most cases we attach ourselves to in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify we can do without it, that we have found something better, and we also attach ourselves to God in horror of men.”

— Emil Cioran

257. “The more intense a spiritual leader’s appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.”

— Emil Cioran

258. “Afflicted with existence, each man endures like an animal the consequences which proceed from it. Thus, in a world where everything is detestable, hatred becomes huger than the world and, having transcended its object, cancels itself out.”

— Emil Cioran

259. “Every form of talent involves a certain shameless-ness.”

— Emil Cioran

260. “Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.”

— Emil Cioran

261. “Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?”

— Emil Cioran

262. “Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist-a demonic, elemental, bestial pessimist-only when life has been defeated many times in its fight against depression.”

— Emil Cioran

263. “Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.”

— Emil Cioran

264. “Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing – between two fictions.”

— Emil Cioran

265. “Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one’s mind, or to define oneself – there is no wish I make more often.”

— Emil Cioran

266. “My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission.”

— Emil Cioran

267. “There is not much difference between a mortal man and a dying man. The absurdity of making plans is only slightly more obvious in the second case.”

— Emil Cioran

268. “Boredom dismantles the mind, renders it superficial, out at the seams, saps it from within and dislocates it.”

— Emil Cioran

269. “Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.”

— Emil Cioran

270. “Reality is a creation of our excesses.”

— Emil Cioran

271. “Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don’t suffer, time flows, so that they don’t live in time, in fact they never have.”

— Emil Cioran

272. “As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.”

— Emil Cioran

273. “Under each formula lies a corpse.”

— Emil Cioran

274. “Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.”

— Emil Cioran

275. “Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.”

— Emil Cioran

276. “Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.”

— Emil Cioran

277. “The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.”

— Emil Cioran

278. “If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.”

— Emil Cioran

279. “Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.”

— Emil Cioran

280. “So long as man is protected by madness – he functions – and flourishes.”

— Emil Cioran

281. “Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.”

— Emil Cioran

282. “Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.”

— Emil Cioran

283. “If you lack the power to demoralize yourself along with the age, to go as low and as far, do not complain of being misunderstood by it.”

— Emil Cioran

284. “What necessity impels a writer who has produced fifty books to write still one more? Why this proliferation, this fear of being forgotten, this debased coquetry?”

— Emil Cioran

285. “I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.”

— Emil Cioran

286. “Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.”

— Emil Cioran

287. “What a pity that ‘nothingness’ has been devalued by an abuse of it made by philosophers unworthy of it!”

— Emil Cioran

288. “Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.”

— Emil Cioran

289. “To think is to take a cunning revenge in which we camouflage our baseness and conceal our lower instincts.”

— Emil Cioran

290. “The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are.”

— Emil Cioran

291. “A sensation must have fallen very low to deign to turn into an idea.”

— Emil Cioran

292. “I do not want to see BP nickel and diming these businesses that are having a tough time.”

— Emil Cioran

293. “On Creating – What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures.”

— Emil Cioran

294. “Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.”

— Emil Cioran

295. “The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.”

— Emil Cioran

296. “To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!”

— Emil Cioran

297. “I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.”

— Emil Cioran

298. “To act is to anchor in the imminent future.”

— Emil Cioran

299. “Word – that invisible dagger.”

— Emil Cioran

300. “There was a time when time did not yet exist.”

— Emil Cioran