Under the rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Cioran's works were banned. [24] In 1974, Francoist Spain banned The Evil Demiurge for being "atheist, blasphemous, and anti-Christian", which Cioran considered "one of the greatest jokes in his absurd existence." [1] Where do you get those superior airs of yours?" "I've managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?" Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.

No modern writer twists the knife with Cioran's dexterity. . . . His writing . . . is informed with the bitterness of genuine compassion."—Bill Marx, Boston Phoenix What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?Cioran's works encompass many other themes as well: original sin, the tragic sense of history, the end of civilization, the refusal of consolation through faith, the obsession with the absolute, life as an expression of man's metaphysical exile, etc. He was a thinker passionate about history; widely reading the writers that were associated with the " Decadent movement". One of these writers was Oswald Spengler who influenced Cioran's political philosophy in that he offered Gnostic reflections on the destiny of man and civilization. According to Cioran, as long as man has kept in touch with his origins and hasn't cut himself off from himself, he has resisted decadence. Today, he is on his way to his own destruction through self-objectification, impeccable production and reproduction, excess of self-analysis and transparency, and artificial triumph. [ citation needed] Everything is possible, and yet nothing is. All is permitted, and yet again, nothing. 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's all the same whether you cry or remain silent. There is an explanation for everything, and yet there is none. Everything is both real and unreal, normal and absurd, splendid and insipid. There is nothing worth more than anything else, nor any idea better than any other. Why grow sad from one's sadness and delight in one's joy? What does it matter whether our tears come from pleasure or pain? Love your unhappiness and hate your happiness, mix everything up, scramble it all! Be a snowflake dancing in the air, a flower floating downstream! Have courage when you don't need to, and be a coward when you must be brave! Who knows? You may still be a winner! And if you lose, does it really matter? Is there anything to win in this world? All gain is loss, all loss is gain. Why always expect a definite stance, clear ideas, meaningful words? I feel as if I should spout fire in response to all the questions which were ever put, or not put, to me. His major works includes book such as The Book of Delusions (1936), Tears and Saints (1937), The Temptation to Exist (1956), History and Utopia (1960), The fall into Time (1964), The Trouble With Being Born (1973), Anathemas and Admirations (1986-1987), The Passionate Handbook (1991). An aged Cioran is the main character in a play by Romanian dramatist-actor Matei Vișniec, Mansardă la Paris cu vedere spre moarte ("A Paris Loft with a View on Death"). The play, depicting an imaginary meeting between Vișniec and Cioran, [40] was first brought to the stage in 2007, under the direction of Radu Afrim and with a cast of Romanian and Luxembourgian actors; Cioran was played by Constantin Cojocaru. [41] Stagings were organized in the Romanian city of Sibiu [40] [41] and in the Luxembourg, at Esch-sur-Alzette (both Sibiu and Luxembourg City were the year's European Capital of Culture). [40] In 2009, the Romanian Academy granted posthumous membership to Cioran. [42]

The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to form a reality to reality's detriment.Bradatan, Costica (28 November 2016). "The Philosopher of Failure: Emil Cioran's Heights of Despair". Los Angeles Review of Books . Retrieved 8 January 2018. 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. The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It's not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul. Mon pays/Țara mea ("My country", written in French, the book was first published in Romania in a bilingual volume), Humanitas, Bucharest, 1996

Cioran’s works cover themes such as despair, death, loneliness, disease, suffering, the abyss, nothingness, anguish, agony, madness, and the absurd. There is something to be said for Cioran, for the way he impugns the vanity of our hopes and expectations, rails at the mute impotence of our idols, and preaches silence. This world was created from God's fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator. Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we live dramas for the boredom of a spectator, whose claps have never reached the ears of a mortal.The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world. At the edge of life you feel that you are no longer master of the life within you, that subjectivity is an illusion, and that uncontrollable forces are seething inside you, evolving with no relation to a personal center or a definite, individual rhythm.", essay 2 - On not wanting to live Wampole, Christy. (2012) "Cioran's Providential Bicycle." Revista Transilvania, January, pp. 51–54. Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith — of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever. The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth. We are unfair to a Nero, a Tiberius: it was not they who invented the concept heretic: they were only degenerate dreamers who happened to be entertained by massacres. The real criminals are men who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic. The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.