Emil Cioran Quotes

A minimum of unconsciousness is necessary if one wants to stay inside history. To act is one thing; to know one is acting is another. When lucidity invests the action, insinuates itself into it, action is undone, and with it, prejudice, whose function consists, precisely, in subordinating, in enslaving consciousness to action. The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depths. No man concerned with his equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.

Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream.

Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.

We are all secularised anarchists today.

We regret not having the courage to make such and such decision; we regret much more having made one — any one. Better no action than the consequences of an action.

Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god.

Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands?

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.

What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.

The flesh spreads, further and further, like a gangrene upon the surface of the globe. It cannot impose limits upon itself, it continues to be rife despite its rebuffs, it takes its defeats for conquests, it has never learned anything. It belongs above all to the realm of the Creator, and it is indeed in the flesh that He has projected His maleficent instincts.

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

To tell the truth, I couldn't care less about the relativity of knowledge, simply because the world does not deserve to be known.

Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

I dream of wanting — and all I want seems to me worthless.