Top 200 Emil M. Cioran Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Everything that can be classified is perishable. Only what is susceptible to several interpretations endures.”

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

104. “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

105. “The more injured you are by time, the more you seek to escape it. To write a faultless page, or only a sentence, raises you above becoming and its corruptions. You transcend death by the pursuit of the indestructible in speech, in the very symbol of nullity.”

— Emil M. Cioran

106. “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

107. “If I reflect on any moment of my life, the most feverish or the most neutral, what remains? – and what difference is there now between them? Everything having become the same, without relief and without reality, it is when I felt nothing that I was closest to the truth, I mean to my present state in which I am recapitulating my experiences. What is the use of having felt anything at all? There is no “ecstasy” which either memory or imagination can resuscitate!”

— Emil M. Cioran

108. “Every form of haste, even toward the good, betrays some mental disorder.”

— Emil M. Cioran

109. “You with your veins full of night – you have no more place among men than an epitaph in the middle of a circus.”

— Emil M. Cioran

110. “Only a monster can allow himself the luxury of seeing things as they are.”

— Emil M. Cioran

111. “As far back as I can remember, I’ve utterly destroyed within myself the pride of being human. And I saunter to the periphery of the Race like a timorous monster, lacking the energy to claim kinship with some other band of apes.”

— Emil M. Cioran

112. “In a work of psychiatry, only the patients’ remarks interest me; in a work of criticism, only the quotations.”

— Emil M. Cioran

113. “History: a context in which the capital letters decompose, and with them, the men who imagine and cherish them.”

— Emil M. Cioran

114. “There is no such thing as a perfect vacuum in history. That unheard-of absence to which we are reduced, and which I have the pleasure and the misfortune to reveal to you, you would be mistaken to imagine merely a blank, uninscribed; for in it I discern – presentiment or hallucination? – a kind of expectation of other gods. Which ones? No one can say. All I know, and it is what everyone knows, is that a situation like ours cannot be endured indefinitely.”

— Emil M. Cioran

115. “Happy in love, Adam would have spared us History.”

— Emil M. Cioran

116. “An idea, a being, anything which becomes incarnate loses identity, turns grotesque.”

— Emil M. Cioran

117. “Since we remember clearly only our ordeals, it is ultimately the sick, the persecuted, the victims in every realm who will have lived to the best advantage. The others – the lucky ones – have a life, of course, but not the memory of life.”

— Emil M. Cioran

118. “To will, in the fullest sense of the word, is to be unaware that one wills, is to refuse to loiter over the phenomenon of the will. The man of action weighs neither his impulses nor his motives, still less does he consult his reflexes: he obeys them without reflecting upon them, without hampering them.”

— Emil M. Cioran

119. “Nothing more abominable than the critic and, a fortiori, the philosopher in each of us: if I were a poet, I should behave like Dylan Thomas, who, when people would discuss his poems in his presence, would drop to the floor in a fit of convulsions.”

— Emil M. Cioran

120. “In Europe, happiness stops at Vienna. Beyond, misery upon misery, since the beginning.”

— Emil M. Cioran

121. “If we do not regard ourselves as entrusted with a mission, existence is difficult; action, impossible.”

— Emil M. Cioran

122. “What is the point of what we say? Is there any meaning to this series of propositions which constitutes our talk? And do these propositions, taken one by one, have any object? We can talk only if we set aside this question, or if we raise it as infrequently as possible.”

— Emil M. Cioran

123. “When someone complains that his life has come to nothing, we need merely remind him that life itself is in an analogous situation, if not worse.”

— Emil M. Cioran

124. “To be “happy” you must constantly bear in mind the miseries you have escaped. This would be a way for memory to redeem itself, since ordinarily it preserves only disasters, eager – and with what success! – to sabotage happiness.”

— Emil M. Cioran

125. “Nescience is the basis of everything, it creates everything by an action repeated every moment, it produces this and any world, since it continually takes for real what in fact is not. Nescience is the tremendous mistake that serves as the basis of all our truths, it is older and more powerful than all the gods combined.”

— Emil M. Cioran

126. “The more we frequent men, the blacker our thoughts; and when, to clarify them, we return to our solitude, we find there the shadow they have cast.”

— Emil M. Cioran

127. “Because to exist is to evaluate, to emit judgments, and because abstention, when it is not the effect of apathy or cowardice, requires an effort no one manages to make.”

— Emil M. Cioran

128. “A passion for music is in itself an avowal. We know more about a stranger who yields himself up to it than about someone who is deaf to music and whom we see every day.”

— Emil M. Cioran

129. “There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books.”

— Emil M. Cioran

130. “If only we could return to those ages when no utterance shackled existence, to the laconism of interjections, to the joyous stupor of the pre- verbal!”

— Emil M. Cioran

131. “Apart from a few examples of exhaustive melancholy, and a few unequalled suicides, men are merely puppets stuffed with red globules in order to beget history and its grimaces.”

— Emil M. Cioran

132. “The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us to be posted in the schools.”

— Emil M. Cioran

133. “A exista e un plagiat.”

— Emil M. Cioran

134. “The evolving absolute, Hegel’s heresy, has become our dogma, our tragic orthodoxy, the philosophy of our reflexes.”

— Emil M. Cioran

135. “Nothing is worse than the coarseness and meanness we perpetrate out of timidity.”

— Emil M. Cioran

136. “There are tears which pierce through the earth and rise as stars in other skies. I wonder who has wept our stars?”

— Emil M. Cioran

137. “The most effective way to avoid dejection, motivated or gratuitous, is to take a dictionary, preferably of a language you scarcely know, and to look up word after word in it, making sure they are the kind you will never use.”

— Emil M. Cioran

138. “The white race increasingly deserves the name given by the American Indians: palefaces.”

— Emil M. Cioran

139. “The book which, after demolishing everything, fails to demolish itself will have exasperated us to no purpose.”

— Emil M. Cioran

140. “I believe speech to be a recent invention, and find it hard to imagine a dialogue that dates back beyond ten thousand years. And even harder, a dialogue that will occur in not ten thousand but even a thousand years from now.”

— Emil M. Cioran

141. “Wisdom is the last word of a dying civilization, the halo of historical sunsets, fatigue turned into a worldview, the final tolerance before the rise of fresher gods – and barbarism.”

— Emil M. Cioran

142. “Can we imagine a city dweller who does not have the soul of a murderer?”

— Emil M. Cioran

143. “According to Meister Eckhart, divinity precedes God, being His essence, his unfathomable depth. What should we find at man’s inmost core which defines his substance in opposition to the divine essence? Neurasthenia – which is to man what divinity is to God.”

— Emil M. Cioran

144. “I draw the curtains, and I wait. Actually, I am not waiting for anything, I am merely making myself absent. Scoured, if only for a few minutes, of the impurities which dim and clog the mind, I accede to a state of consciousness from which the self is evacuated, And I am as soothed as if I were resting outside the universe.”

— Emil M. Cioran

145. “When we think of the Berlin salons in the Romantic period, of the role played in them by a Henrietta Herz or a Rachel Levin, of the friendship between the latter and Crown Prince Louis-Ferdinand; and when we then think that if such women had lived in this century they would have died in some gas chamber, we cannot help considering the belief in progress as the falsest and stupidest of superstitions.”

— Emil M. Cioran

146. “Noble gestures are always suspect. Each time, we regret having committed them. Something false about them, something theatrical, attitudinizing. It is true that we regret ignoble gestures almost as much.”

— Emil M. Cioran

147. “If it is characteristic of the wise man to do nothing useless, no one will surpass me in wisdom: I do not even lower myself to useful things.”

— Emil M. Cioran

148. “When I think of all the agonies on this earth, I know there are souls which could not be lifted by cohorts of angels, so heavy they will not be able to rise at the Last Judgement, frozen in the barenness of their own curses. Only light souls can be saved: those whose weight will not break the wings of angels.”

— Emil M. Cioran

149. “Ferocity occurs in all conditions save in joy. Schadenfreude, malicious joy, is a misrepresentation. To do evil is a pleasure, not a joy. Joy, the one true victory over the world, is pure in its essence, hence irreducible to pleasure, which is always suspect, both in itself and in its manifestations.”

— Emil M. Cioran

150. “We should keep to a single language, and deepen our knowledge of it at every opportunity. For a writer, gossiping with a concierge in his own is much more profitable than arguing with a scholar in a foreign tongue.”

— Emil M. Cioran