Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.
Nothing is worse than the coarseness and meanness we perpetrate out of timidity.
What are you waiting for in order to give up?
The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life.
I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end.
The "west" — what curse has fallen upon it that at the term of its trajectory it produces only these businessmen, these shopkeepers, these racketeers with their blank stares and atrophied smiles... is it with such vermin as this that a civilization so delicate and so complex must come to an end?
No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?
Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.
Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.
Who does not believe in Fate proves that he has not lived.
Sadness makes you God's prisoner.
When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god.
In this dream, I was flattering someone I despise. Waking, a greater self-loathing than if I had really committed such vileness...
Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.
In conversation with someone, whatever his merits may be, never forget for a moment that in his profound reactions he is no different from ordinary mortals. For discretion's sake, you must handle him carefully, for like anyone else, he will not tolerate frankness, direct cause of almost all quarrels and grudges.
Impossible to accede to truth by opinions, for each opinion is only a mad perspective of reality.
Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.