Emil Cioran Quotes

The only way you can become a legend is in your coffin

Oh, you know, your legacy's all you're gonna be remembered by.

Death is dreadful to the man whose all is extinguished with his life; but not to him whose glory never can die.

Posthumous fame is a plant of tardy growth, for our body must be the seed of it; or we may liken it to a torch, which nothing but the last spark of life can light up; or we may compare it to the trumpet of the archangel, for it is blown over the dead; but unlike that awful blast, it is of earth, not of heaven, and can neither rouse nor raise us.

Now he belongs to the ages.

Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an after-life.

When the 'Guardian' is commissioning writers to write obituary pieces about you and your career... it doesn't get much nastier than that. And you've just got to go, 'It doesn't actually matter.'

It's not whether you win or lose, it's how many people remember you when you die.

Age makes all things greater after their death; a name comes to the tongue easier from the grave.

Of present fame think little, and of future less; the praises that we receive after we are buried, like the flowers that are strewed over our grave, may be gratifying to the living, but they are nothing to the dead.

I can't be a legend yet. I'm not dead.

I hope when I'm dead I'll be considered an icon, though.

I don't give a toss about being remembered after my death.

The only 'afterlife' is what other people remember of you.

Men's fame is like their hair, which grows after they are dead, and with just as little use to them.

I've had a wonderful life. What people are going to write about me 10 years after I'm dead - who cares?

I don't care much whether people remember me or not. If people remember, well and good. If they don't remember, it's alright - I'm dead anyway.

I am not concerned about my posthumous fame. Monuments are no good to the dead.

I want to be remembered.

I have seen so many poets who were famous, who won all sorts of prizes, disappear with their death. I write as good as I can and don't try to turn that into some hope for a future that I could never know.

Legacy is something you talk about when you're dead - and I'm not dead yet.

It doesn't worry me how I'm remembered.

I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.

Death makes no conquest of this conqueror: For now he lives in fame, though not in life.

How prudently most men creep into nameless graves, while now and then one or two forget themselves into immortality.