Emil M. Cioran

“Lucidity is the only vice which make us free - free in a desert.”

— Emil M. Cioran

“There is no limit-disappointment.”

— Emil M. Cioran

“The cynicism of utter solitude is a calvary relieved by insolence.”

— Emil M. Cioran

“The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.”

— Emil M. Cioran

“Inelegant to reproach a man for his sterility, when that is his postulate, his mode of achievement, his dream….”

— Emil M. Cioran

“In permitting man, Nature has committed much more than a mistake in her calculations: a crime against herself.”

— Emil M. Cioran

“If we do not regard ourselves as entrusted with a mission, existence is difficult; action, impossible.”

— Emil M. Cioran

“In a work of psychiatry, only the patients’ remarks interest me; in a work of criticism, only the quotations.”

— Emil M. Cioran

“History: a context in which the capital letters decompose, and with them, the men who imagine and cherish them.”

— Emil M. Cioran

“The emphasis on birth is no more than the craving for the insoluble carried to the point of insanity.”

— Emil M. Cioran

“Every form of haste, even toward the good, betrays some mental disorder.”

— Emil M. Cioran

“My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding. It is what lets me comprehend Buddha, but also what keeps me from following him.”

— Emil M. Cioran

“However disabused one may be, it is impossible to live without any hope at all. We always keep one, unwittingly, and this…

— Emil M. Cioran

“Existence might well have had some attraction before the advent of noise — let us say, before the neolithic age. When will…

— Emil M. Cioran

“That faint light in each of us which dates back to before our birth, to before all births, is what must be…

— Emil M. Cioran

“The first thinker was, without a doubt, the first man obsessed by why. An unaccustomed mania, not at all contagious: rare indeed…

— Emil M. Cioran

“Look neither ahead nor behind, look into yourself, with neither fear nor regret. No one descends into himself so long as he…

— Emil M. Cioran

“The future appeals to you? All yours! Myself I prefer to keep to the incredible present and the incredible past. I leave…

— Emil M. Cioran

“She meant absolutely nothing to me. Realizing, suddenly, after so many years, that whatever happens i shall never see her again, I…

— Emil M. Cioran

“Only normal that man should no longer be interested in religion but in religions, for only through them will he be in…

— Emil M. Cioran

“What makes bad poets worse is that they read only poets (just as bad philosophers read only philosophers), whereas they would benefit…

— Emil M. Cioran

“There are nights that the most ingenious torturers could not have invented. We emerge from them in pieces, stupid, dazed, with neither…

— Emil M. Cioran

“Fanaticism is the death of conversation. We do not gossip with a candidate for martyrdom. What are we to say to someone…

— Emil M. Cioran

“What a bore, someone who doesn’t deign to make an impression. Vain people are almost always annoying, but they make an effort,…

— Emil M. Cioran

“Existence = Torment. The equation seems obvious to me, but not to one of my friends. How to convince him? I cannot…

— Emil M. Cioran

“O triunfo da não-autenticidade tem seu acabamento na atividade filosófica, esta complacência no ''se'', e na atividade profética (religiosa, moral ou política),…

— Emil M. Cioran

“...feeling of being everything and the evidence of being nothing.' I happened across this phrase in my youth, and was overwhelmed by…

— Emil M. Cioran

“This is how we recognize the man who has tendencies toward an inner quest: he will set failure above any success, he…

— Emil M. Cioran

“An Egyptian monk, after fifteen years of complete solitude, received a packet of letters from his family and friends. He did not…

— Emil M. Cioran

“Consider carefully the merest event: in the best of cases, the positive and negative elements that participate in it balance out; generally…

— Emil M. Cioran

“The notion that it would have been better never to exist is among those which meet with the most opposition. Every man,…

— Emil M. Cioran

“There’s no help for it,” the nonagenarian kept repeating to whatever I said, to whatever I shouted into her ear concerning the…

— Emil M. Cioran

“If you try to convert someone, it will never be to effect his salvation but to make him suffer like yourself, to…

— Emil M. Cioran

“Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and our memory.”

— Emil M. Cioran

“You with your veins full of night — you have no more place among men than an epitaph in the middle of…

— Emil M. Cioran

“Stoicism for show: to be an enthusiast of nil admirari, an hysteric of ataraxia.”

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

“Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.”

— Emil M. Cioran

“Nothing is worse than the coarseness and meanness we perpetrate out of timidity.”

— Emil M. Cioran

“Truth remains hidden to the man filled with desire and hatred” (Buddha)…. Which is to say, to every man alive.”

— Emil M. Cioran