Top 200 Emil M. Cioran Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I was alone in that cemetery overlooking the village when a pregnant woman came in. I left at once, in order not to look at this corpse-bearer at close range, nor to ruminate upon the contrast between an aggressive womb and the time-worn tombs – between a false promise and the end of promises.”

— Emil M. Cioran

52. “Bach was quarrelsome, litigious, self-serving, greedy for titles and honors, etc. So what! A musicologist listing the cantatas whose theme is death has remarked that no mortal ever had such a nostalgia for it. Which is all that counts. The rest has to do with biography.”

— Emil M. Cioran

53. “The dissolving power of conversation. One realizes why both meditation and action require silence.”

— Emil M. Cioran

54. “A little more fervor in my nihilism and I might – gainsaying everything – shake off my doubts and triumph over them. But I have only the taste of negation, not its grace.”

— Emil M. Cioran

55. “That faint light in each of us which dates back to before our birth, to before all births, is what must be protected if we want to rejoin that remote glory from which we shall never know why we are separated.”

— Emil M. Cioran

56. “To be something – unconditional – is always a form of madness from which life – flower of fixed ideas – frees itself only to fade.”

— Emil M. Cioran

57. “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

58. “If there is so much discomfort and ambiguity in lucidity, it is because lucidity is the result of the poor use to which we have put our sleepless nights.”

— Emil M. Cioran

59. “A work is finished when we can no longer improve it, though we know it to be inadequate and incomplete. We are so overtaxed by it that we no longer have the power to add a single comma, however indispensable. What determines the degree to which a work is done is not a requirement of art or of truth, it is exhaustion and, even more, disgust.”

— Emil M. Cioran

60. “To that friend who tells me he is bored because he cannot work, I answer that boredom is a higher state, and that we debase it by relating it to the notion of work.”

— Emil M. Cioran

61. “Deep inside, each man feels – and believes – himself to be immortal, even if he knows he will perish the next moment. We can understand everything, admit everything, realize everything, except our death, even when we ponder it unremittingly and even when we are resigned to it.”

— Emil M. Cioran

62. “Enlightened despotism: the only regime that can attract a disabused mind, one incapable of being the accomplice of revolutions since it is not even the accomplice of history.”

— Emil M. Cioran

63. “The more gifted a man is, the less progress he makes on the spiritual level. Talent is an obstacle to the inner life.”

— Emil M. Cioran

64. “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

65. “We all believe in many more things than we think, we harbour intolerances, we cherish bloody prejudices, and, defending our ideas with extreme means, we travel the world like ambulatory and irrefragable fortresses. Each of us is a supreme dogma to himself; no theology protects its god as we protect our self; and if we assail this self with doubts and call it into question, we do so only be a pseudo-elegance of our pride: the case is already won.”

— Emil M. Cioran

66. “There are nights that the most ingenious torturers could not have invented. We emerge from them in pieces, stupid, dazed, with neither memories nor anticipations, and without even knowing who we are. And it is then that the day seems useless, light pernicious, even more oppressive than the darkness.”

— Emil M. Cioran

67. “De cierto tipo de vigilias se desprende el cuestionar el nacimiento.”

— Emil M. Cioran

68. “The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them.”

— Emil M. Cioran

69. “Nothing more aggravating than a seamless, unremitting irony which leaves you no time to breathe and still less to think; which instead of being inconspicuous, occasional, is massive, automatic, at the antipodes of its essentially delicate nature. Which in any case is how it is used in Germany, a nation which, having meditated upon it the most, is least capable of wielding it.”

— Emil M. Cioran

70. “No autocrat wields a power comparable to that enjoyed by a poor devil planning to kill himself.”

— Emil M. Cioran

71. “I have tried to be faithful to my knowledge, to force my instincts to yield, and realized that it is no use wielding the weapons of nothingness if you cannot turn them against yourself.”

— Emil M. Cioran

72. “To hell with everything” – if these words have been uttered, even only once, coldly, with complete awareness of what they mean, history is justified and, with it, all of us.”

— Emil M. Cioran

73. “I may change my opinion on the same subject, the same event, ten, twenty, thirty times in the course of a single day. And to think that each time, like the worst impostor, I dare utter the word “truth”!”

— Emil M. Cioran

74. “To have opinions is inevitable, is natural; to have convictions is less so. Each time I meet someone who has convictions, I wonder what intellectual vice, what flaw has caused him to acquire such a thing. However legitimate this question, my habit of raising it spoils the pleasure of conversation for me, gives me a bad conscience, makes me hateful in my own eyes.”

— Emil M. Cioran

75. “In Marx’s entire oeuvre, I don’t think there is a single disinterested reflection on death... I was pondering this at his grave in Highgate.”

— Emil M. Cioran

76. “Vocea viorii este zgomotul pe care-l face, deschizandu-se, poarta paradisului.”

— Emil M. Cioran

77. “The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.”

— Emil M. Cioran

78. “We must side with the oppressed on every occasion, even when they are in the wrong, though without losing sight of the fact that they are molded of the same clay as their oppressors.”

— Emil M. Cioran

79. “We invest ourselves with an abusive superiority when we tell someone what we think of him and of what he does. Frankness is not compatible with a delicate sentiment, nor even with an ethical exigency.”

— Emil M. Cioran

80. “Old age is the most unexpected thing of all that happens to man,” – notes Trotsky a few years before his end. If, as a young man, he had had the exact, visceral intuition of this truth, what a miserable revolutionary he would have made!”

— Emil M. Cioran

81. “It is because of speech that men give the illusion of being free. If they did – without a word – what they do, we would take them for robots. By speaking, they deceive themselves, as they deceive others: because they say what they are going to do, who could suspect they are not masters of their actions?”

— Emil M. Cioran

82. “Saintliness is a special kind of madness. While the madness of mortals exhausts itself in useless and fantastic actions, holy madness is a conscious effort towards winning everything.”

— Emil M. Cioran

83. “Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel – three enslavers of the mind. The worst form of despotism is the system, in philosophy and in everything.”

— Emil M. Cioran

84. “There is no false sensation.”

— Emil M. Cioran

85. “Hegel is chiefly responsible for modern optimism. How could he have failed to see that consciousness changes only its forms and modalities, but never progresses?”

— Emil M. Cioran

86. “Excess of deliberation frustrates all actions. To expatiate upon sexuality is to sabotage it altogether. Eroticism, scourge of deliquescent societies, is an offense against instinct, an organized impotence. We do not reflect with impunity upon exploits that dispense with reflection. Orgasm has never been a philosophical event.”

— Emil M. Cioran

87. “A privilege to live in conflict with one’s times. At every moment one is aware one does not think like the others. This state of acute dissimilarity, however indigent or sterile it appears, nonetheless possesses a philosophical status which one would be at a loss to seek in cogitations attuned to events.”

— Emil M. Cioran

88. “A serious, honest mind understands – and can understand – nothing of history. History in return is marvelously suited to delight an erudite cynic.”

— Emil M. Cioran

89. “For the victim of anxiety, there is no difference between success and fiasco. His reaction to the one is the same as to the other: both trouble him equally.”

— Emil M. Cioran

90. “When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment’s thought to the “meaning” of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not in abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.”

— Emil M. Cioran

91. “In permitting man, Nature has committed much more than a mistake in her calculations: a crime against herself.”

— Emil M. Cioran

92. “By a certain age, we should change names and hide out somewhere, lost to the world, in no danger of seeing friends or enemies again, leading the peaceful life of an overworked malefactor.”

— Emil M. Cioran

93. “The best of myself, that point of light which distances me from everything, I owe to my infrequent encounters with a few bitter fools, a few disconsolate bastards, who, victims of the rigor of their cynicism, could no longer attach themselves to any vice.”

— Emil M. Cioran

94. “To exist is a state as little conceivable as its contrary. No, still more inconceivable.”

— Emil M. Cioran

95. “What right have we to be annoyed by someone who calls us a monster? The monster is unique by definition, and solitude, even the solitude of infamy, supposes something positive, a peculiar election, but undeniably an election.”

— Emil M. Cioran

96. “The mind that puts everything in question reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?”

— Emil M. Cioran

97. “The Captain was a peasant established in the Absolute.”

— Emil M. Cioran

98. “A foretold misfortune, when at last it occurs, is ten, is a hundred times harder to endure than one we did not expect. All during our apprehensions, we lived through it in advance, and when it happens these past torments are added to the present ones, and together they form a mass whose weight is intolerable.”

— Emil M. Cioran

99. “All great events have been set in motion by madmen, by mediocre madmen. Which will be true, we may be sure, of the “end of the world” itself.”

— Emil M. Cioran

100. “Call it insensitivity or a passion for remorse, I have never undertaken to rescue what little Absolute this world contains.”

— Emil M. Cioran