Emil Cioran Quotes
We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone 'happy', no greater flattery than to grant him a 'vein of melancholy'... This is because gaiety is link to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.
Emil Cioran
Quotes to Explore
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
Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
Emil Cioran
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
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
To conceive a thought - just one, but one that would tear the universe to pieces.
Emil Cioran
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
To have committed every crime but that of being a father.
Emil Cioran
Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.
Emil Cioran
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
What is marvelous is that each day brings us a new reason to disappear.
Emil Cioran
Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.
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
