Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
Truth remains hidden from the man who is filled with hatred and desire...which is to say, every man alive!
Without it's assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation?
If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
The reaction against your own thought in itself lends life to thought. How this reaction is born is hard to describe, because it identifies with the very rare intellectual tragedies. ––The tension, the degree and level of intensity of a thought proceeds from its internal antinomies, which in turn are derived from the unsolvable contradictions of a soul. Thought cannot solve the contradictions of the soul. As far as linear thinking is concerned, thoughts mirror themselves in other thoughts, instead of mirroring a destiny.
Try as I will, I don't see what might exist...
I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the Gods have been against me.
Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.
Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.
By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?
The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.
Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying? - that void is consciousness itself.
Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.
Life inspires more dread than death — it is life which is the great unknown.
The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.
Boredom levels all enigmas: a positivist reverie.
The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.
Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself.