The complaint extended to Nietzsche's writing style. "I can no longer read Nietzsche or take an interest in him. He seems too naïve. It has been a long time since I've ceased to admire him. A diminished idol. He took pleasure in prolixity, in padding, in grandiose diffusion." "We must censure the later Nietzsche for a panting excess in the writing, the absence of rests" He was too lyrical and his literary taste was second-rate.

Older Cioran was put off by Nietzsche's inexperience, by his megalomania, and by his lack of humor. "Nietzsche was too carried away by a tragic breeze to be capable of that form of skepticism that pre- supposes humor." Cioran believed that Nietzsche's lack of humor was one reason for his success among the young. Nietzsche was too solitary to understand the conflicts that exist between people, or the means by which people were able to coexist in large cities. At first Cioran exempted Nietzsche from his fulminations against modern philosophers, but in his later years he thought Nietzsche was too academic and knew too little of life. Nietzsche didn't understand Greece, and worse, he didn't understand himself. He was "a lamb who dreamt he was a wolf."

In 1986, in reply to a question about Susan Sontag's comparison of Cioran and Nietzsche, Cioran said, "There is, I dare say, a resemblance of temperament between Nietzsche and me: we are both insomniacs. That creates a complicity." The complicity extended to common ideas about suicide and the salutary value of thinking about suicide as a means for surviving sleepless nights. Cioran said that "without the idea of suicide I would certainly have killed myself; Nietzsche wrote: "The thought of suicide is a powerful comfort: it helps one through many a dreadful night.”

"Masters in the art of thinking against oneself, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Dostoyevsky have taught us to side with our dangers, to broaden the sphere of our diseases, to acquire existence by division from our being."

Anonymous, Cioran and Nietzsche