In 1937, Cioran moved to the Latin Quarter of Paris, which became his permanent residence, wherein he lived in seclusion with his partner, Simone Boué, until his death in 1995.

[2] At 10, Cioran moved to Sibiu to attend school, and at 17, he was enrolled in the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy at the University of Bucharest, where he met Eugène Ionesco and Mircea Eliade, who became his friends.

Notes from Cioran's adolescence indicated a study of Friedrich Nietzsche, Honoré de Balzac, Arthur Schopenhauer and Fyodor Dostoevsky, among others.

While at the university, he was influenced by Georg Simmel, Ludwig Klages and Martin Heidegger, but also by the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov, whose contribution to Cioran's central system of thought was the belief that life is arbitrary.

[5] In 1933, he received a scholarship to the University of Berlin, where he studied Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Hegel, Edmund Husserl, Immanuel Kant, Georg Simmel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.

While in Berlin, he became interested in the policies of the Nazi regime, contributed a column to Vremea dealing with the topic (in which Cioran confessed that "there is no present-day politician that I see as more sympathetic and admirable than Hitler",[6] while expressing his approval for the Night of the Long Knives—"what has humanity lost if the lives of a few imbeciles were taken"),[7] and, in a letter written to Petru Comarnescu, described himself as "a Hitlerist".

Tears and Saints was "incredibly poorly received", and after it was published, Cioran's mother wrote him asking him to retract the book because it was causing her public embarrassment.

[11] Although Cioran was never a member of the group, it was during this time in Romania that he began taking an interest in the ideas put forth by the Iron Guard—a far right organization whose nationalist ideology he supported until the early years of World War II, despite allegedly disapproving of their violent methods.

"[12] Cioran revised The Transfiguration of Romania heavily in its second edition released in the 1990s, eliminating numerous passages he considered extremist or "pretentious and stupid".

In its original form, the book expressed sympathy for totalitarianism,[13] a view which was also present in various articles Cioran wrote at the time,[14] and which aimed to establish "urbanization and industrialization" as "the two obsessions of a rising people".

[16] In 1934, he wrote, "I find that in Romania the sole fertile, creative, and invigorating nationalism can only be one which does not just dismiss tradition, but also denies and defeats it".

For example, in a 1972 interview, he condemned it as "a complex of movements; more than this, a demented sect and a party", saying, "I found out then [...] what it means to be carried by the wave without the faintest trace of conviction.

[25] Furthermore, he described his move to Paris as "by far the most intelligent thing" he had ever done, and in The Trouble with Being Born he says, "In continual rebellion against my ancestry, I have spent my whole life wanting to be something else: Spanish, Russian, cannibal—anything, except what I was.

He lived most of his life in seclusion, avoiding the public, but still maintained contact with numerous friends, including Mircea Eliade, Eugène Ionesco, Paul Celan, Samuel Beckett, Henri Michaux and Fernando Savater.

[1] Professing a lack of interest in conventional philosophy in his early youth, Cioran dismissed abstract speculation in favor of personal reflection and passionate lyricism.

[34]Philosophical pessimism characterizes all of his works, which many critics trace back to events of his childhood (in 1935 his mother is reputed to have told him that if she had known he was going to be so unhappy she would have aborted him).

When Cioran's mother spoke to him of abortion, he confessed that it did not disturb him, but made an extraordinary impression which led to an insight about the nature of existence ("I'm simply an accident.

[35] His works often depict an atmosphere of torment, a state that Cioran himself experienced, and came to be dominated by lyricism and, often, the expression of intense and even violent feeling.

[36] 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.

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.

"[38] William H. Gass called Cioran's The Temptation to Exist "a philosophical romance on the modern themes of alienation, absurdity, boredom, futility, decay, the tyranny of history, the vulgarities of change, awareness as agony, reason as disease".

During Cioran's lifetime, Saint-John Perse called him "the greatest French writer to honor our language since the death of Paul Valéry.

[25] 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.