110+ Emile M. Cioran Quotes On Friendship, Existential And Cynical

Emile M. Cioran was a Romanian philosopher, essayist, and political commentator. He wrote works on topics such as suffering, decay, and nihilism. His work features a mix of both pessimism and irony, and has been described as "philosophical nihilism". Following is our collection on famous quotes by Emile M. Cioran on friendship, life, love.

Top 10 Emile M. Cioran Quotes

1. There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.
2. Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.
3. By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
4. 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.
5. The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.
6. Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?
7. The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.
8. Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.
9. Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.
10. Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

Emile M. Cioran Short Quotes

• The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.
• Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
• In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
• I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.
• To accomplish nothing and die of the strain
• No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
• Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.
• I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.
• Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
• No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

Emile M. Cioran Quotes About Life

Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear. — Emile M. Cioran

Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach. — Emile M. Cioran

Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown. — Emile M. Cioran

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory. — Emile M. Cioran

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. — Emile M. Cioran

In most cases we attach ourselves to in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify we can do without it, that we have found something better, and we also attach ourselves to God in horror of men. — Emile M. Cioran

We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence. — Emile M. Cioran

Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy. — Emile M. Cioran

If you're unlucky enough not to have alcoholic parents, it takes you a whole lifetime of intoxication to overcome the dead weight of their virtues. — Emile M. Cioran

Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist-a demonic, elemental, bestial pessimist-only when life has been defeated many times in its fight against depression. — Emile M. Cioran

Emile M. Cioran Quotes About Love

The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love. — Emile M. Cioran

Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us. — Emile M. Cioran

The Art of Love: knowing how to combine the temperament of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone. — Emile M. Cioran

What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots. — Emile M. Cioran

Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates. — Emile M. Cioran

The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims. — Emile M. Cioran

Emile M. Cioran Quotes About Fear

A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity. — Emile M. Cioran

The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth. — Emile M. Cioran

The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion... One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it. — Emile M. Cioran

Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears. — Emile M. Cioran

What necessity impels a writer who has produced fifty books to write still one more? Why this proliferation, this fear of being forgotten, this debased coquetry? — Emile M. Cioran

Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent -unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it -we perpetuate it within ourselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude. — Emile M. Cioran

There is only one thing worse than boredom, and that is the fear of boredom. — Emile M. Cioran

Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires. — Emile M. Cioran

Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom? — Emile M. Cioran

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. — Emile M. Cioran

Emile M. Cioran Quotes About Live

To live... in any sense of the word... is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence. — Emile M. Cioran

One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living. — Emile M. Cioran

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it. — Emile M. Cioran

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. — Emile M. Cioran

To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer. As soon as they consent to live, the unbeliever and the man of faith are fundamentally the same, since both have made the only decision that defines a being. — Emile M. Cioran

To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life. — Emile M. Cioran

One doesn't live in a country, one lives in a language. — Emile M. Cioran

I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away. — Emile M. Cioran

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. — Emile M. Cioran

To live entirely without a goal! I have glimpsed this state, and have often attained it, without managing to remain there: I am too weak for such happiness. — Emile M. Cioran

Emile M. Cioran Quotes About Feel

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. — Emile M. Cioran

Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim. — Emile M. Cioran

Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods. — Emile M. Cioran

To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel you are consubstantial with that future. — Emile M. Cioran

One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world. — Emile M. Cioran

I try--without success--to stop finding reasons for vanity in anything. When I happen to manage it nonetheless, I feel that I no longer belong to the mortal gang. I am above everything then, above the gods themselves. Perhaps that is what death is: a sensation of great, of extreme superiority. — Emile M. Cioran

Thinking should be like musical meditation. Has any philosopher pursued a thought to its limits the way Bach or Beethoven develop and exhaust a musical theme? Even after having read the most profound thinkers, one still feels the need to begin anew. Only music gives definitive answers. — Emile M. Cioran

All people see fires, storms, explosions, or landscapes; but how many feel the flames, the lightnings, the whirlwinds, or the harmony? How many have an inner beauty that tinges their melancholy? — Emile M. Cioran

I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person — Emile M. Cioran

Emile M. Cioran Quotes About World

Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough. — Emile M. Cioran

One hardly saves a world without ruling it. — Emile M. Cioran

Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness. — Emile M. Cioran

I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity. — Emile M. Cioran

True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes. — Emile M. Cioran

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world. — Emile M. Cioran

To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world. — Emile M. Cioran

The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy? — Emile M. Cioran

Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world. — Emile M. Cioran

Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day. — Emile M. Cioran

Emile M. Cioran Famous Quotes And Sayings

Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce. — Emile M. Cioran

History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable. — Emile M. Cioran

It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false — Emile M. Cioran

Hungarian Language — savage it may be but of a beauty that has nothing human about it, with sonorities of another universe, powerful and corrosive, appropriate to prayer, to groans and to tears, risen out of hell to perpetuate its accent and its aura…words of nectar and cyanide. — Emile M. Cioran

Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him. — Emile M. Cioran

The amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its profundity. — Emile M. Cioran

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone. — Emile M. Cioran

What strangely enchanted tunes gush forth during those sleepless nights! — Emile M. Cioran

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void. — Emile M. Cioran

The only free mind is one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity. — Emile M. Cioran

Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor and revolt, a perplexity on fire. — Emile M. Cioran

Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves. — Emile M. Cioran

There was a time when time did not yet exist. — Emile M. Cioran

If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out. — Emile M. Cioran

Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time. — Emile M. Cioran

Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home? — Emile M. Cioran

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen. — Emile M. Cioran

Everything is pathology, except for indifference. — Emile M. Cioran

Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy! — Emile M. Cioran

Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart's drama and the negative meaning of history. — Emile M. Cioran

A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect. — Emile M. Cioran

I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual. — Emile M. Cioran

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death. — Emile M. Cioran

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. — Emile M. Cioran

Tyrants are always assassinated too late. That is their great excuse. — Emile M. Cioran

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification. — Emile M. Cioran

Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture. — Emile M. Cioran

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion. — Emile M. Cioran

By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed? — Emile M. Cioran

No one can keep his griefs in their prime; they use themselves up. — Emile M. Cioran

The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it. — Emile M. Cioran

When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves. — Emile M. Cioran

Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in. — Emile M. Cioran

Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty. — Emile M. Cioran

A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself. — Emile M. Cioran

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us. — Emile M. Cioran

When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act." And they do calm down. — Emile M. Cioran

I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers. — Emile M. Cioran

Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young. — Emile M. Cioran

Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death? — Emile M. Cioran

No human beings are more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief — Emile M. Cioran

To act is to anchor in the imminent future. — Emile M. Cioran

My enthusiasms...constitute my reserves, my unexploited resources, perhaps my future. — Emile M. Cioran

Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish. — Emile M. Cioran

Existing is plagiarism. — Emile M. Cioran

True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer. — Emile M. Cioran

What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity? — Emile M. Cioran

The limit of every pain is an even greater pain. — Emile M. Cioran

Consciousness is nature's nightmare. — Emile M. Cioran

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it. — Emile M. Cioran

A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society — Emile M. Cioran

Society: an inferno of saviors! — Emile M. Cioran

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten. — Emile M. Cioran

A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession. — Emile M. Cioran

To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall? — Emile M. Cioran

Boredom dismantles the mind, renders it superficial, out at the seams, saps it from within and dislocates it. — Emile M. Cioran

Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it. — Emile M. Cioran

Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions. — Emile M. Cioran

What is pity but the vice of kindness. — Emile M. Cioran

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate. — Emile M. Cioran

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on. — Emile M. Cioran

It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: in truth, it is itself the quintessence of injustice. — Emile M. Cioran

Word - that invisible dagger. — Emile M. Cioran

Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it. — Emile M. Cioran

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions. — Emile M. Cioran

Life Lessons by Emile M. Cioran

1. Emile M. Cioran emphasizes the importance of accepting life's inevitable suffering and recognizing the futility of trying to escape it. He encourages us to accept the truth of our mortality and to recognize the beauty in life's transience.
2. He encourages us to be mindful of our actions and to take responsibility for them, emphasizing the importance of living in the present and not dwelling on the past or worrying about the future.
3. Cioran also encourages us to embrace the joy of living and to enjoy the small pleasures life has to offer, while also recognizing the importance of cultivating a sense of inner peace and contentment.