Emil Cioran Quotes

Emil Cioran

Profession : Philosopher

Birth : April 8, 1911

To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel you are consubstantial with that future.

Emil Cioran

It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.

Emil Cioran

However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.

Emil Cioran

To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.

Emil Cioran

Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.

Emil Cioran

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.

Emil Cioran

What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?

Emil Cioran

I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.

Emil Cioran

Under each formula lies a corpse.

Emil Cioran

We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

Emil Cioran

You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.

Emil Cioran

God - a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.

Emil Cioran

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

Emil Cioran

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

Emil Cioran

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

Emil Cioran

Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.

Emil Cioran

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

Emil Cioran

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

Emil Cioran

Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.

Emil Cioran

We inhabit a language rather than a country.

Emil Cioran