Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
Out of patience with them all. But I like to laugh. And I cannot laugh alone.
Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.
To have nothing more in common with men than the fact of being a man!
That man is going to disappear has been, heretofore, my firm conviction. But now I've changed my mind: he must disappear.
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
I dream of wanting - and all I want seems to me worthless.
Anyone who quotes us from memory - and incorrectly - is a saboteur who should be taken to court. A garbled quotation is equivalent to betrayal, an insult, a prejudice all the more serious in that the intention was to do us a favor.
The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
We regret not having the courage to make such and such decision; we regret much more having made one - any one. Better no action than the consequences of an action.
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.
The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity… Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does this whispering voice say? Everything in us that is not human anymore.
Why don't I commit suicide? Because I am as sick of death as I am of life. I should be cast into a flaming caldron! Why am I on this earth? I feel the need to cry out, to utter a savage scream that will set the world atremble with dread. I am like a lightning bolt ready to set the world ablaze and swallow it all in the flames of my nothingness. I am the most monstrous being in history, the beast of the apocalypse full of fire and darkness, of aspirations and despair. I am the beast with a contorted grin, contracting down to illusion and dilating toward infinity, both growing and dying, delightfully suspended between hope for nothing and despair of everything, brought up among perfumes and poisons,consumed with love and hatred, killed by lights and shadows. My symbol is the death of light and the flame of death. Sparks die in me only to be reborn as thunder and lightning. Darkness itself glows in me.
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.
"What is truth?" is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to "How to endure life?" And even this one pales beside the next: "How to endure oneself?" - That is the crucial question in which no one is in a position to give us an answer.
Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.
If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
If our fellow men could be aware of our opinions about them, love, friendship, and devotion would be forever erased from the dictionaries; and if we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an "I" without shame.
Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life.