Top 200 Emil M. Cioran Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

153. “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

154. “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

155. “In a Gnostic work of the second century of our era, we read: ‘The prayer of a melancholy man will never have the strength to rise unto God.’... Since man prays only in despondency, we may deduce that no prayer has ever reached its destination.”

— Emil M. Cioran

156. “Man will not last. Ambushed by exhaustion, he will have to pay for his too-original career. For it would be inconceivable and contra naturam that he drag on much longer and come to a good end. This prospect is depressing, hence likely.”

— Emil M. Cioran

157. “The not at all negligible advantage of having greatly hated men is that one comes to endure them by the exhaustion of this very hatred.”

— Emil M. Cioran

158. “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

159. “Expression diminishes you, impoverishes you, lifts weights off you: expression is loss of substance, and liberation.”

— Emil M. Cioran

160. “What a notion, to place a clown like Diogenes in so lofty a niche!”

— Emil M. Cioran

161. “For all we tell ourselves about not outliving a stillborn babe, instead of clearing out at the first opportunity, we cling, with lunatic energy, to one day more.”

— Emil M. Cioran

162. “Each generation lives in the absolute: it behaves as if it had reached the apex if not the end of history.”

— Emil M. Cioran

163. “We cannot do without the notion of progress, yet it does not deserve our attention. It is like the ‘meaning’ of life. Life must have one. But is there any which does not turn out, upon examination, to be ludicrous?”

— Emil M. Cioran

164. “He who is lucid, understands himself, explains himself, justifies himself, and masters his acts will never execute a memorable action. Psychology is the hero’s tomb.”

— Emil M. Cioran

165. “And if Indifference fills him to overflowing, if he makes it into a reality as vast as the universe itself, it is because Indifference is the practical equivalent of doubt, and in his eyes does doubt not have the prestige of the Unconditioned?”

— Emil M. Cioran

166. “A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth, where our mania for salvation makes life unbreathable.”

— Emil M. Cioran

167. “The only moments I think of with relief are those when I sought to be nothing for anyone, when I blushed at the notion of leaving the slightest trace in the memory of a single human being...”

— Emil M. Cioran

168. “The West: a sweet-smelling rottenness, a perfumed corpse.”

— Emil M. Cioran

169. “If you are doomed to devour yourself, nothing can keep you from it: a trifle will impel you as much as a tragedy. Resign yourself to erosion at all times: your fate wills it so.”

— Emil M. Cioran

170. “With all due respect to Tertullian, the soul is naturally pagan. Any god at all, when he answers to our immediate needs, represents for us an increase of vitality, a stimulus, which is not the case if he is imposed upon us or if he corresponds to no necessity. Paganism’s mistake was to have accepted and accumulated too many of them: it died of generosity and excess of understanding – it died from a lack of instinct.”

— Emil M. Cioran

171. “Everything that is engenders, sooner or later, nightmares. Let us try, therefore, to invent something better than being.”

— Emil M. Cioran

172. “When we have exhausted the pretexts which incite us to gaiety or melancholy, we come to the point of experiencing either one in a pure state: which is how we join the mad...”

— Emil M. Cioran

173. “Whenever philosophers insinuate themselves into Letters, it is to exploit their confusion or to precipitate their collapse.”

— Emil M. Cioran

174. “We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface...”

— Emil M. Cioran

175. “What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.”

— Emil M. Cioran

176. “The West is making progress, timidly sporting its senility – and already I feel less envy of those who, having seen Rome founder, believed they were enjoying a unique and intransmissible desolation.”

— Emil M. Cioran

177. “Though we ourselves have come too late, we shall be envied by our immediate successors, and still more by our remote descendants. In their eyes we shall have the look of privileged characters, and rightly so, for everyone wants to be as far as possible from the future.”

— Emil M. Cioran

178. “The appetite for torment is for some what the lure of gain is for others.”

— Emil M. Cioran

179. “In any book governed by the Fragment, truths and whims keep company throughout.”

— Emil M. Cioran

180. “Only to the degree that our moments afford us some contact with death do we have some chance to glimpse on what insanity all existence is based.”

— Emil M. Cioran

181. “I fail to witness the gods’ hilarity at leaving behind the human episode.”

— Emil M. Cioran

182. “With Baudelaire, physiology entered into poetry; with Nietzsche, into philosophy. By them, the troubles of the organs were raised to song, to concept. With health the one thing proscribed, it was incumbent upon them to afford disease a career.”

— Emil M. Cioran

183. “Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.”

— Emil M. Cioran

184. “As long as you live on this side of the terrible, you will find words to express it; once you know it from inside, you will no longer find a single one.”

— Emil M. Cioran

185. “In vain the West seeks a form of final agony worthy of its past.”

— Emil M. Cioran

186. “Meditate but one hour upon the self’s nonexistence and you will feel yourself to be another man,” said a priest of the Japanese Kusha sect.”

— Emil M. Cioran

187. “The abundance of solutions to the aspects of existence is equalled only by their futility.”

— Emil M. Cioran

188. “We have the more hold over this world the further we withdraw from it, the less we adhere to it.”

— Emil M. Cioran

189. “My greed for agonies has made me die so many times that it strikes me as indecent to keep on abusing a corpse from which I can get nothing more.”

— Emil M. Cioran

190. “Whereas all beings have their place in nature, man remains a metaphysically straying creature, lost in Life, a stranger to the Creation.”

— Emil M. Cioran

191. “I remember a place I have been only if I have had the luck to experience utter misery there.”

— Emil M. Cioran

192. “What I discern in each moment is its exhaustion, its death-rattle, and not the transition to the next moment. I generate dead time, wallowing in the asphyxia of becoming.”

— Emil M. Cioran

193. “Paganism is the deepening of appearances, while saintliness is the sickness of depths.”

— Emil M. Cioran

194. “Getting up with my head full of plans, I would be working, I was sure of it, all morning long. No sooner had I sat down at my desk than the odious, vile, and persuasive refrain: “What do you expect of this world?” stopped me short. And I returned, as usual, to my bed with the hope of finding some answer, of going back to sleep.”

— Emil M. Cioran

195. “As the years accumulate, we form an increasingly somber image of the future.”

— Emil M. Cioran

196. “If it is true that by death we once more become what we were before being, would it not have been better to abide by that pure possibility, not to stir from it? What use was this detour, when we might have remained forever in an unrealized plenitude?”

— Emil M. Cioran

197. “Every anomaly seduces us, Life in the first place, that anomaly par excellence.”

— Emil M. Cioran

198. “By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing; but instead of nonchalantly promenading our corruption, we exude our sweat and grow winded upon the fetid air. All History is in a state of petrification; its odours shift toward the future: we rush toward it, if only for the fever inherent in any decomposition.”

— Emil M. Cioran

199. “A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth, where our mania for salvation makes life unbreathable... Everyone trying to remedy everyone’s life. Society- an inferno of saviors!”

— Emil M. Cioran

200. “Man is free – and sterile – only in the interval when the gods die; slave – and creative – only in the interval when, as tyrants, they flourish.”

— Emil M. Cioran