Top 200 Emil M. Cioran Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “If the expression “metaphysical exile” had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.”

— Emil M. Cioran

154. “And this nothing, this everything, cannot give life a meaning, but it nonetheless makes life persevere in what it is: a state of non-suicide.”

— Emil M. Cioran

155. “In paradise, objects and beings, assaulted by light from all sides, cast no shadow. Which is to say that they lack reality, like anything that is unbroached by darkness and deserted by death.”

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— 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. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

160. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

172. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

175. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

178. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

181. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

193. “If only I could reach the level of the man I would have liked to be! But some power, increasing year by year, draws me down.”

— Emil M. Cioran

194. “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

195. “The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity...”

— Emil M. Cioran

196. “It is a misfortune for an author to be understood.”

— Emil M. Cioran

197. “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

198. “There are hearts into which even God cannot look without losing his innocence.”

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

200. “It may very well be tht man’s sole purpose is none other than to think of god. If we could either love him or ignore him we would be saved.”

— Emil M. Cioran