Emil Cioran > Quotes

“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
― Emil Cioran

“A book is a suicide postponed.”
― Emil Cioran

“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?”
― Emil Cioran

“Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs—something, anything.... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.”
― Emil Cioran

“If we could truly see ourselves the way others see us we'd disappear on the spot.”
― Emil Cioran

“لا وجود إلا لعلامة واحدة تشهد على أننا فهمنا كل شىء: أن نبكي بلا سبب”
― Emil Cioran

“لا ينتحر إلا المتفائلون، المتفائلون الذين لم يعودوا قادرين على الإستمرار فى التفاؤل. أما الآخرين، فلماذا يكون لهم مبرر للموت و هم لا يملكون مبرراً للحياة”
― Emil Cioran, المياه كلها بلون الغرق

“Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.”
― Emil Cioran

“مخافة أن نتعذب، نبذل قصارى جهدنا كى نلغى الواقع، و ما أن نفلح فى ذلك حتى يتحول هذا الإلغاء نفسه إلى مصدر عذاب”
― Emil Cioran, المياه كلها بلون الغرق

“Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone.”
― Emil Cioran, The New Gods

“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.”
― Emil Cioran

“Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.”
― Emil Cioran

“Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.”
― Emil Cioran

“The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.”
― Emil Cioran

“Tears do not burn except in solitude.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”
― Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints

“Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.”
― Emil Cioran

“In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.”
― Emil Cioran

“مع التقدم فى السن يتعلم المرء مقايضة مخاوفه بقهقهاته :)))))”
― Emil Cioran, المياه كلها بلون الغرق

“إذا حزنت مرة دونما سبب فثِق أنك كنت حزيناً طيلة حياتك دون أن تعرف”
― Emil Cioran, المياه كلها بلون الغرق

“سر تكيفى مع الحياة؟ أنى أغيّر اليأس كما أغيّر القميص”
― Emil Cioran, المياه كلها بلون الغرق

“We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.”
― Emil Cioran

“Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.”
― Emil Cioran

“كلما ازدادت لا مبالاتى بالبشر تضاعفت قدرتهم على التأثير فىّ، و مهما احتقرتهم فإنى لا أستطيع الإقتراب منهم إلا متلعثماً”
― Emil Cioran, المياه كلها بلون الغرق

“I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen--and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies.”
― Emil Cioran

“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

“Nu pot fi eu insumi decat daca ma inalt pana la furie sau cobor pana la descurajare: la nivelul meu obisnuit, ignor faptul ca exist.”
― Emil Cioran

“Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.”
― Emil Cioran

“It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say “we" with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke "others" and regard himself as their interpreter - for me to consider him my enemy.”
― Emil Cioran

“The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“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.”
― Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints

“I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.”
― Emil Cioran

“الضحك هو المبرر الكبير للحياة! وعليَّ القول إنني، حتى في أعمق لحظات اليأس، كنت قادرا على الضحك. هذا ما يميز الإنسان عن الحيوان. الضحك ظاهرة عدمية، تماما كما يمكن للفرح أن يكون حالة مأتمية”
― Emil 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. ”
― Emil Cioran

“لكلٍ جنونه، و قد تمثّل جنونى فى أن أعتبر نفسى سوياً، سوياً بشكلٍ خطِر، و لما كان الآخرون يبدون لى مجانين، فقد انتهى بى الأمر إلى الخوف منهم، و إلى الخوف منّى أكثر”
― Emil Cioran, المياه كلها بلون الغرق

“Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.”
― Emil Cioran, All Gall Is Divided: Aphorisms

“لا شيء يثبت أننا أكثر من لا شيء.”
― Emil 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.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“مللت من كوني أنا، ومع ذلك أتوسل للآلهة باستمرار كي تعيدني إلى ذاتي”
― Emil Cioran

“الرومانسيون كانو آخر المختصين فى الإنتحار. بعدهم صار الإنتحار عرضة إلى عدم الإتقان. من أجل تحسين نوعيته، نحن فى حاجة كبيرة إلى مرض جديد للعصر”
― Emil Cioran, المياه كلها بلون الغرق

“Nobody would dare look at himself in the mirror, because a grotesque, tragic image would mix in the contours of his face with stains and traces of blood, wounds which cannot be healed, and unstoppable streams of tears. I would experience a kind of voluptuous awe if I could see a volcano of blood, eruptions as red as fire and as burning as despair, burst into the midst of the comfortable and superficial harmony of everyday life, or if I could see all our hidden wounds open, making of us a bloody eruption forever. Only then would we truly understand and appreciate the advantage of loneliness, which silences our suffering and makes it inaccessible. The venom drawn out from suffering would be enough to poison the whole world in a bloody eruption, bursting out of the volcano of our being. There is so much venom, so much poison, in suffering!”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.”
― Emil Cioran

“Between the demand to be clear,and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect.”
― Emil Cioran

“A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.”
― Emil Cioran

“I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“It has been a long time since philosophers have read men’s souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born