Life & Mortality Quote by Emile M. Cioran

Cioran lands the line like a verdict, not an observation: language isn’t a neutral tool we wield, it’s a substance that wears us down. “Fling” is the tell. It’s not careful speech, not the slow construction of meaning, but verbal littering - words thrown off in impatience, vanity, performative certainty. The sentence turns talk into expenditure: every utterance spends a bit of life, and the more reckless the spending, the steeper the cost.

The intent is characteristically Cioranian: to make you suspicious of your own fluency. His work is saturated with the idea that consciousness is an affliction and that expression often serves as a narcotic, a way to avoid the raw fact of existing. In that light, “die in proportion” isn’t mystical; it’s accounting. We decay by converting experience into slogans, turning feeling into talk, outsourcing inner life to chatter. Words promise mastery over reality, but Cioran suggests they actually accelerate our estrangement from it.

The subtext has bite in any era, but it stings in modernity’s noise economy. To “fling” words is to treat speech as disposable and identity as a running commentary. Cioran, writing out of the disillusionments of 20th-century Europe and his own self-exile into French, knew how ideologies metastasize through language - how grand vocabularies recruit bodies. The line reads as both personal ethic and political warning: every surplus word courts falseness, and falseness is a slow kind of death. Silence, by implication, isn’t emptiness; it’s refusal to spend yourself cheaply.