Top 200 Emil M. Cioran Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

8. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

11. “I shall never utterly admire anyone except a man dishonored – and happy. There is a man, I should say, who defies the opinion of his fellows and who finds consolation and happiness in himself alone.”

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

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

— 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. “We should repeat to ourselves, every day: I am one of the billions dragging himself across the earth’s surface. One, and no more. This banality justifies any conclusion, any behavior or action: debauchery, chastity, suicide, work, crime, sloth, or rebellion... Whence it follows that each man is right to do what he does.”

— Emil M. Cioran

28. “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

29. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

31. “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

32. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

34. “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

35. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

39. “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

40. “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

41. “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

42. “The future appeals to you? All yours! Myself I prefer to keep to the incredible present and the incredible past. I leave it to you to face the Incredible itself.”

— Emil M. Cioran

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “Death is not altogether useless: after all, it is because of death that we may be able to recuperate the prenatal space, our only space...”

— Emil M. Cioran

47. “Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one’s reach.”

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

49. “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

50. “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