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Emil Cioran
532 quotes
“At the edge of life you feel that you are no longer master of the life within you, that subjectivity is an illusion, and that uncontrollable forces are seething inside you, evolving with no relation to a personal center or a definite, individual rhythm.", essay 2 - On not wanting to live”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I ask myself; Why is it that only some people suffer? Why are only some selected from the ranks of normal people and put on the torture rack? Some religions maintain that God is trying us through suffering, or that we expiate evil and unbelief through it. If such an explanation can satisfy the religious man, it is not sufficient for anyone who notices that suffering is arbitrary and unjust, because the innocent often suffer most. There is no valid justification for suffering. Suffering has no hierarchy of values.", in essay: the monopoly of suffering”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“maybe suffering has no more justification than life.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No one commits suicide for external reasons, only because of inner disequilibrium. Under similar adverse circumstances, some are indifferent, some are moved, some are driven to suicide.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I admire only two types of people: the potentially mad and the potential suicide.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why don't I commit suicide? Because I am as sick of death as I am of life.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't need any support, advice, or compassion, because even if I am the most ruinous man, I still feel so powerful, so strong and fierce. For I am the only one that lives without hope.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are questions which, once approached, either isolate you or kill you outright.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death's prisoner.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Haven't people learned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles?”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Knowledge is the plague of life, and consciousness, an open wound in its heart.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tears do not burn except in solitude.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If there was a God of sorrow, he would grow black heavy wings, to soar not for the skies, but for inferno.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn't it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history — greater than the fall of empires — I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion, when the intuition of disaster is so painful that it almost provokes a greater madness [...] One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How I wish I didn't know anything about myself and this world!”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Great joys, why do they bring us sadness? Because there remains from these excesses only a feeling of irrevocable loss and desertion which reaches a high degree of negative intensity. At such moments, instead of a gain, one keenly feels loss. sadness accompanies all those events in which life expends itself. its intensity is equal to its loss. Thus death causes the greatest sadness.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To tell the truth, I couldn't care less about the relativity of knowledge, simply because the world does not deserve to be known.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to empty abstraction.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the biggest paradoxes of our world: memories vanish when we want to remember, but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Compared to the refined culture of sclerotic forms and frames, which mask everything, the lyrical mode is utterly barbarian in its expression. Its value resides precisely in its savage quality: it is only blood, sincerity, and fire.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The terrifying experience and obsession of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of yourself. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Out of the shadow of the abstract man, who thinks for the pleasure of thinking, emerges the organic man, who thinks because of a vital imbalance, and who is beyond science and art.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am displeased with everything. If they made me God, I would immediately resign.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and aesthetic ideals? It's all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Can it really be that for us existence means exile, and nothingness, home?”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have no ideas, only obsessions. Anybody can have ideas. Ideas have never caused anybody’s downfall.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity; — for thoughts, there is always time; life has its time; there is no thought that comes too late; any desire can become a regret.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everyone must destroy their life. According to the way they do it, they're either triumphants or failures.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The reaction against your own thought in itself lends life to thought. How this reaction is born is hard to describe, because it identifies with the very rare intellectual tragedies. — The tension, the degree and level of intensity of a thought proceeds from its internal antinomies, which in turn are derived from the unsolvable contradictions of a soul. Thought cannot solve the contradictions of the soul. As far as linear thinking is concerned, thoughts mirror themselves in other thoughts, instead of mirroring a destiny.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It's not easy to be on the wrong foot with life”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity... Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does this whispering voice say? Everything in us that is not human anymore.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To withstand any truth...”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All philosophers should end their days at Pythia's feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That fear which gives birth to thoughts, and the fear of thoughts...”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source