Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
Society: an inferno of saviors.
To be or not to be...Neither one nor the other.
As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.
I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.
The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it. Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?
Nothing deserves to be undone, doubtless because nothing deserved to be done.
We must censure the later Nietzsche for a panting excess in the writing, the absence of rests.
Reality is a creation of our excesses.
The interesting thing about friendship is that it is - almost as much as love - an inexhaustible source of disappointment and outrage, thereby of fruitful surprises it would be madness to try to do without.
Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.
Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.
Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?
Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
To hope is to contradict the future.
The farther men get from God, the farther they advance into the knowledge of religions.
Boredom is a larval anxiety; depression, a dreamy hatred.
The proof that man loathes man? Enough to be in a crowd, in order to feel that you side with all the dead planets.
If relations between men are so difficult, it is because men have been created to knock each other down and not to have "relations."
Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.
Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man.