Emil Cioran Quotes

Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Emil Cioran Quotes. Let’s look at these pieces of wisdom. We definitely have something to learn from them!

1
Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
Emil Cioran
2
Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
Emil Cioran
3
Isn’t history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
Emil Cioran
4
If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
Emil Cioran
5
Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.
Emil Cioran
6
Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.
Emil Cioran
7
A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
Emil Cioran
8
My mission is to kill time, and time’s to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.
Emil Cioran
9
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
Emil Cioran
10
Jealousy – that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.
Emil Cioran
11
Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
Emil Cioran
12
Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
Emil Cioran
13
The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
Emil Cioran
14
When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
Emil Cioran
15
Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
Emil Cioran
16
What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name – and moving on.
Emil Cioran
17
Word – that invisible dagger.
Emil Cioran
18
Negation is the mind’s first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.
Emil Cioran
19
Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
Emil Cioran
20
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
Emil Cioran
21
However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.
Emil Cioran
22
The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
Emil Cioran
23
We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
Emil Cioran
24
Our first intuitions are the true ones.
Emil Cioran
25
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
Emil Cioran
26
Everything is pathology, except for indifference.
Emil Cioran
27
We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
Emil Cioran
28
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live – moreover, the only one.
Emil Cioran
29
Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.
Emil Cioran
30
We inhabit a language rather than a country.
Emil Cioran
31
The Universal view melts things into a blur.
Emil Cioran
32
Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
Emil Cioran
33
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
Emil Cioran
34
Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
Emil Cioran
35
I’m simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
Emil Cioran
36
Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.
Emil Cioran
37
Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.
Emil Cioran
38
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
Emil Cioran
39
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland – and no other.
Emil Cioran
40
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
Emil Cioran
41
To Live signifies to believe and hope – to lie and to lie to oneself.
Emil Cioran
42
Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.
Emil Cioran
43
We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
Emil Cioran
44
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
Emil Cioran
45
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
Emil Cioran
46
Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
Emil Cioran
47
Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
Emil Cioran
48
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
Emil Cioran
49
Under each formula lies a corpse.
Emil Cioran
50
Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
Emil Cioran
51
A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
Emil Cioran
52
Life inspires more dread than death – it is life which is the great unknown.
Emil Cioran
53
Jealousy – that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.
Emil Cioran
54
In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
Emil Cioran
55
God – a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
Emil Cioran
56
Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
Emil Cioran
57
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
Emil Cioran
58
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.
Emil Cioran
59
Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven’t been cut off.
Emil Cioran
60
We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
Emil Cioran
61
It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
Emil Cioran
62
A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.
Emil Cioran
63
Under each formula lies a corpse.
Emil Cioran
64
The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.
Emil Cioran
65
The Universal view melts things into a blur.
Emil Cioran
66
I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
Emil Cioran
67
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
Emil Cioran
68
What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you – what a revelation.
Emil Cioran
69
To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.
Emil Cioran
70
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
Emil Cioran
71
For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
Emil Cioran
72
Glory – once achieved, what is it worth?
Emil Cioran
73
Tolerance – the function of an extinguished ardor – tolerance cannot seduce the young.
Emil Cioran
74
To Live signifies to believe and hope – to lie and to lie to oneself.
Emil Cioran
75
Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
Emil Cioran
76
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula… to give a facade tot he void.
Emil Cioran
77
No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
Emil Cioran
78
I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.
Emil Cioran
79
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher’s the poet’s equal there.
Emil Cioran
80
I have no nationality – the best possible status for an intellectual.
Emil Cioran
81
Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.
Emil Cioran
82
Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
Emil Cioran
83
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
Emil Cioran
84
Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
Emil Cioran
85
The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.
Emil Cioran
86
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
Emil Cioran
87
To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.
Emil Cioran
88
One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
Emil Cioran
89
The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.
Emil Cioran
90
A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.
Emil Cioran
91
Truths begin by a conflict with the police – and end by calling them in.
Emil Cioran
92
You are done for – a living dead man – not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.
Emil Cioran
93
Word – that invisible dagger.
Emil Cioran
94
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
Emil Cioran
95
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
Emil Cioran