This is how we recognize the man who has tendencies toward an inner quest: he will set failure above any success, he will even seek it out, unconsciously of course. This is because failure, always essential, reveals us to ourselves, permits us to see ourselves as God sees us, whereas success distances us from what is most inward in ourselves and indeed in everything.

— Emil M. Cioran

Emil M. Cioran Quotes

Every anomaly seduces us, Life in the first place, that anomaly par excellence.

— Emil M. Cioran

In vain the West seeks a form of final agony worthy of its past.

— Emil M. Cioran

A exista e un plagiat.

— Emil M. Cioran

We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface...

— Emil M. Cioran

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.

— Emil M. Cioran

I was alone in that cemetery overlooking the village when a pregnant woman came in. I left at once, in order not to look at this corpse-bearer at close range, nor to ruminate upon the contrast between an aggressive womb and the time-worn tombs – between a false promise and the end of promises.

— Emil M. Cioran

It is a misfortune for an author to be understood.

— Emil M. Cioran

Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.

— Emil M. Cioran

What a notion, to place a clown like Diogenes in so lofty a niche!

— Emil M. Cioran

Only a monster can allow himself the luxury of seeing things as they are.

— Emil M. Cioran

What I discern in each moment is its exhaustion, its death-rattle, and not the transition to the next moment. I generate dead time, wallowing in the asphyxia of becoming.

— Emil M. Cioran

The West: a sweet-smelling rottenness, a perfumed corpse.

— Emil M. Cioran

As serfs, these people built cathedrals; emancipated, they build only horrors.

— Emil M. Cioran

With all due respect to Tertullian, the soul is naturally pagan. Any god at all, when he answers to our immediate needs, represents for us an increase of vitality, a stimulus, which is not the case if he is imposed upon us or if he corresponds to no necessity. Paganism’s mistake was to have accepted and accumulated too many of them: it died of generosity and excess of understanding – it died from a lack of instinct.

— Emil M. Cioran

A genre becomes universal when it seduces minds which have no reason to embrace it.

— Emil M. Cioran

Whenever philosophers insinuate themselves into Letters, it is to exploit their confusion or to precipitate their collapse.

— Emil M. Cioran

I remember a place I have been only if I have had the luck to experience utter misery there.

— Emil M. Cioran

The West is making progress, timidly sporting its senility – and already I feel less envy of those who, having seen Rome founder, believed they were enjoying a unique and intransmissible desolation.

— Emil M. Cioran

The evolving absolute, Hegel’s heresy, has become our dogma, our tragic orthodoxy, the philosophy of our reflexes.

— Emil M. Cioran

With Baudelaire, physiology entered into poetry; with Nietzsche, into philosophy. By them, the troubles of the organs were raised to song, to concept. With health the one thing proscribed, it was incumbent upon them to afford disease a career.

— Emil M. Cioran
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