Top 200 Emil M. Cioran Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 5

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

— Emil M. Cioran

152. “No longer wanting to be a man... , dreaming of another form of failure.”

— Emil M. Cioran

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

163. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

165. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

168. “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

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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

173. “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

174. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

176. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

178. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

181. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

192. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

195. “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

196. “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

197. “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

198. “He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one.”

— Emil M. Cioran

199. “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

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

— Emil M. Cioran