Emil Cioran Quotes

I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide...

Emil Cioran

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• Humanity

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Quotes to Explore

• Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

  

  Emil Cioran
  • Ambition
  • Drug

• Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.

  

  Emil Cioran
  • Progress
  • Drama
  • Desert

• 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. Yet in a less assured mood, birth seems a calamity I would be miserable not having known.

  

  Emil Cioran
  • World
  • Mood

• To conceive a thought - just one, but one that would tear the universe to pieces.

  

  Emil Cioran
  • Universe

• The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don’t know where that elsewhere is.

  

  Emil Cioran
  • Up
  • Feeling
  • Charity

• Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.

  

  Emil Cioran
  • Abuse

• To have committed every crime but that of being a father.

  

  Emil Cioran
  • Father

• Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion.

  

  Emil Cioran
  • Life
  • Death
  • Dream

• Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle...

  

  Emil Cioran
  • Nature
  • Suffering
  • Fate

• What is marvelous is that each day brings us a new reason to disappear.

  

  Emil Cioran

• Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral…

  

  Emil Cioran
  • Nature
  • Death
  • Universe

• Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.

  

  Emil Cioran
  • Paradise
  • Insomnia

• An anxious man constructs his terrors, then installs himself within them: a stay-at-home in a yawning chasm.

  

  Emil Cioran
  • Home

• I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the Gods have been against me.

  

  Emil Cioran

• We suffer: the external world begins to exist...; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality.

  

  Emil Cioran
  • World
  • Pain

• That fear which gives birth to thoughts, and the fear of thoughts…

  

  Emil Cioran
  • Fear
  • Thoughts

• To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement.

  

  Emil Cioran

• No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

  

  Emil Cioran
  • Freedom

• Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself.

  

  Emil Cioran
  • Fear

• 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.

  

  Emil Cioran
  • Live
  • Power
  • Die

• What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

  

  Emil Cioran
  • Giving
  • Moving

• Only the idiot is equipped to breathe.

  

  Emil Cioran
  • Breathe

• My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

  

  Emil Cioran
  • Luck

• Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.

  

  Emil Cioran
  • Fear