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