Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.
When we know what words are worth, the amazing thing is that we try to say anything at all, and that we manage to do so. This requires, it is true, a supernatural nerve.
Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?
In the usual boredom, we desire nothing, we even lack the curiosity to weep; in the excess of boredom it is just the contrary, for this excess incites us to action, and weeping is an action.
Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that we alone pursue the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear.
To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion.
The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.
Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are.
You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness.
To rid oneself of life is to deprive oneself the pleasure of deriding it. (The one possible answer to someone who informs you of his intent to be done with it all.)
Music is an illusion that makes up for all the others.
We cannot avoid the defects of men without fleeting, thereby, their virtues. So we ruin ourselves by wisdom.
All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.
To Foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by the hatred smothered within.
In order to deceive melancholy, you must keep moving. Once you stop, it wakens, if in fact it has ever dozed off.
Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.
The universal view melts things into a blur.
So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.
What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.
That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.