Top 200 Emil M. Cioran Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Not the fear of effort but the fear of success explains more than one failure.”

— Emil M. Cioran

2. “Bach’s music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded as a complete failure. Without Bach, God would be a complete second-rate figure.”

— Emil M. Cioran

3. “This is how we recognize the man who has tendencies toward an inner quest: he will set failure above any success, he will even seek it out, unconsciously of course. This is because failure, always essential, reveals us to ourselves, permits us to see ourselves as God sees us, whereas success distances us from what is most inward in ourselves and indeed in everything.”

— Emil M. Cioran

4. “My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding. It is what lets me comprehend Buddha, but also what keeps me from following him.”

— Emil M. Cioran

5. “History is irony on the move.”

— Emil M. Cioran

6. “The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.”

— Emil M. Cioran

7. “Only normal that man should no longer be interested in religion but in religions, for only through them will he be in a position to understand the many versions of his spiritual collapse.”

— Emil M. Cioran

8. “Man accepts death but not the hour of his death. To die any time, except when one has to die!”

— Emil M. Cioran

9. “What do you do from morning to night?” “I endure myself.”

— Emil M. Cioran

10. “I do not struggle against the world, I struggle against a greater force, against my weariness of the world.”

— Emil M. Cioran

11. “Look neither ahead nor behind, look into yourself, with neither fear nor regret. No one descends into himself so long as he remains a slave of the past or of the future.”

— Emil M. Cioran

12. “When we see someone again after many years, we should sit down facing each other and say nothing for hours, so that by means of silence our consternation can relish itself.”

— Emil M. Cioran

13. “A philosopher is saved from mediocrity only by skepticism or mystique, these two forms of despair in the front of knowledge. Mystique is an escape from knowledge, and skepticism is knowledge without hope. In both kinds world is not a solution.”

— Emil M. Cioran

14. “However disabused one may be, it is impossible to live without any hope at all. We always keep one, unwittingly, and this unconscious hope makes up for all the explicit others we have rejected, exhausted.”

— Emil M. Cioran

15. “In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left – ignorant how to react – with a foolish grin.”

— Emil M. Cioran

16. “The cynicism of utter solitude is a calvary relieved by insolence.”

— Emil M. Cioran

17. “She meant absolutely nothing to me. Realizing, suddenly, after so many years, that whatever happens i shall never see her again, I nearly collapsed. We understand what death is only by suddenly remembering the face of someone who has been a matter of indifference to us.”

— Emil M. Cioran

18. “After a sleepless night, the people in the street seem automatons. No one seems to breathe, to walk. Each looks as if he is worked by clockwork: nothing spontaneous; mechanical smiles, spectral gesticulations. Yourself a specter, how would you see others as alive?”

— Emil M. Cioran

19. “This world can take everything from us, can forbid us everything, but no one has the power to keep us from wiping ourselves out.”

— Emil M. Cioran

20. “I abuse the word God; I use it often, too often. I employ it each time I touch an extremity and need a word to designate what comes after. I prefer God to the Inconceivable.”

— Emil M. Cioran

21. “If, as we grow older, we scrutinize our own past at the expense of ‘problems’, it is simply because we handle memories more readily than ideas.”

— Emil M. Cioran

22. “Conversation is fruitful only between minds given to consolidating their perplexities.”

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

24. “Deep in his heart, man aspires to rejoin the condition he had before consciousness. History is merely the detour he takes to get there.”

— Emil M. Cioran

25. “It is of no importance to know who I am since some day I shall no longer be” – that is what each of us should answer those who bother about our identity and desire at any price to coop us up in a category or a definition.”

— Emil M. Cioran

26. “I looked for my salvation in the Utopia, but I have only found some solace in the Apocalypse.”

— Emil M. Cioran

27. “The first thinker was, without a doubt, the first man obsessed by why. An unaccustomed mania, not at all contagious: rare indeed are those who suffer from it, who are a prey to questioning, and who can accept no given because they were born in consternation.”

— Emil M. Cioran

28. “Mystery – a word we use to deceive others, to convince them we are “deeper” than they are.”

— Emil M. Cioran

29. “Never judge a man without putting yourself in his place.” This old proverb makes all judgment impossible, for we judge someone only because, in fact, we cannot put ourselves in his place.”

— Emil M. Cioran

30. “We dismiss the skeptic, we speak of an “automatism of doubt,” while we never say of a believer that he has fallen into an “automatism of faith.” Yet faith is much more mechanical than doubt, which has the excuse of proceeding from surprise to surprise – inside perplexity, it is true.”

— Emil M. Cioran

31. “We should have been excused from lugging a body: the burden of the self is enough.”

— Emil M. Cioran

32. “The problem of responsibility would have a meaning only if we had been consulted before our birth and had consented to be precisely who we are.”

— Emil M. Cioran

33. “Lucidity is the only vice which make us free – free in a desert.”

— Emil M. Cioran

34. “Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.”

— Emil M. Cioran

35. “If you love your independence, you must lend yourself, in order to protect it, to every turpitude; you must risk ignominy itself.”

— Emil M. Cioran

36. “A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of his talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.”

— Emil M. Cioran

37. “It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.”

— Emil M. Cioran

38. “We know, we feel that everything has been said, that there is nothing left to say. But we feel less that this truth affords language a strange, even unsettling status which redeems it. Words are ultimately saved because they have ceased living.”

— Emil M. Cioran

39. “Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.”

— Emil M. Cioran

40. “When, getting too used to ourselves, we begin to loathe ourselves, we soon realize that we are worse off, that self-hatred actually strengthens self-attachment.”

— Emil M. Cioran

41. “As serfs, these people built cathedrals; emancipated, they build only horrors.”

— Emil M. Cioran

42. “I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point.”

— Emil M. Cioran

43. “It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say ‘we’ with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke ‘others’ and regard himself as their interpreter – for me to consider him my enemy.”

— Emil M. Cioran

44. “You’re against everything that’s been done since the last war,” said the very up-to-date lady. “You’ve got the wrong date: I’m against everything that’s been done since Adam.”

— Emil M. Cioran

45. “Every friendship is an inconspicuous drama, a series of subtle wounds.”

— Emil M. Cioran

46. “Stoicism for show: to be an enthusiast of nil admirari, an hysteric of ataraxia.”

— Emil M. Cioran

47. “There is no limit-disappointment.”

— Emil M. Cioran

48. “My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out... in me anything is possible, for I am he who at the supreme moment, in front of absolute nothingness, will laugh.”

— Emil M. Cioran

49. “Life is the privilege of mediocre people. Only mediocrities live at life’s normal temperature; the others are consumed at temperatures at which life cannot endure, at which they can barely breathe, already one foot beyond life.”

— Emil M. Cioran

50. “In order to conquer panic or some tenacious anxiety, there is nothing like imagining your own burial. An effective method, readily available to all. In order not to have to resort to it too often in the course of a day, best to experience its benefit straight off, when you get up. Or else use it only at exceptional moments, like Pope Innocent IX, who, having commissioned a painting in which he was shown on his deathbed, glanced at it each time he had to make some important decision.”

— Emil M. Cioran