Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left...with a foolish grin.
What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!
Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth...
Deep in his heart, man aspires to rejoin the condition he had before consciousness. History is merely the detour he takes to get there.
The more disabused a man's mind, the more he risks, stricken by love, reacting like a schoolgirl.
Mental therapeutics abound among rich nations: the absence of immediate anxieties sustains a sickly climate. In order to preserve its nervous well-being, a nation needs a substantial disaster, an object for its afflictions, a positive terror justifying its complexes. Societies consolidate in danger and atrophy in neutrality. Where peace and hygiene and comfort flourish, psychoses multiply...I come from a country which, never having known happiness, has produced but one psychoanalyst.
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.
I know peace only when my ambitions sleep. Once they waken, anxiety repossesses me. Life is a state of ambition. The mole digging his tunnels is ambitious. Ambition is in effect everywhere, and we see its traces on the faces of the dead themselves.
Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.
If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.
The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know what that elsewhere is.
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another.
When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.
Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.
One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.
I want to proclaim a truth that would forever exile me from among the living. I know only the conditions but not the words that would allow me to formulate it.