Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— Emil M. Cioran

“There is no limit-disappointment.”

— Emil M. Cioran

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

— 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

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

— 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

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

— Emil M. Cioran

“The more we frequent men, the blacker our thoughts; and when, to clarify them, we return to our solitude, we find there…

— Emil M. Cioran

“Mine still, this moment passes by, escapes me, and is buried forever. Am I going to commit myself with the next? I…

— Emil M. Cioran

“To hell with everything" — if these words have been uttered, even only once, coldly, with complete awareness of what they mean,…

— Emil M. Cioran

“We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither…

— Emil M. Cioran

“Deep inside, each man feels — and believes — himself to be immortal, even if he knows he will perish the next…

— Emil M. Cioran

“The best of myself, that point of light which distances me from everything, I owe to my infrequent encounters with a few…

— Emil M. Cioran

“When someone complains that his life has come to nothing, we need merely remind him that life itself is in an analogous…

— Emil M. Cioran

“The mind that puts everything in question reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in…

— Emil M. Cioran

“Nescience is the basis of everything, it creates everything by an action repeated every moment, it produces this and any world, since…

— Emil M. Cioran

“When someone tells us of an unfavorable opinion about ourselves, instead of being distressed, we should think of all the “evil” we…

— Emil M. Cioran

“Getting up with my head full of plans, I would be working, I was sure of it, all morning long. No sooner…

— Emil M. Cioran

“If I reflect on any moment of my life, the most feverish or the most neutral, what remains? — and what difference…

— Emil M. Cioran

“Filming a scene, there are countless takes of the same incident. Someone watching in the street - obviously a provincial - can't…

— 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

“...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

“We dismiss the skeptic, we speak of an “automatism of doubt,” while we never say of a believer that he has fallen…

— 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

— 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

“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

“Mystery — a word we use to deceive others, to convince them we are "deeper" than they are.”

— Emil M. Cioran

“Deep in his heart, man aspires to rejoin the condition he had before consciousness. History is merely the detour he takes to…

— Emil M. Cioran