Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement.
Between the demand to be clear and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect.
One disgust, then another - to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind...The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive.
We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.
Vehement by nature, vacillating by choice. Which way to tend? Which whom to side? What self to join?
If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned — a saint or a corpse.
Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.
Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.
To see in every baby a future Richard III...
The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous.
How can you know if you are in the truth? The criterion is simple enough: if others make a vacuum around you, there is not a doubt in the world that you are closer to the essential than they are.
The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?
For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.
To think is to undermine - to undermine oneself. Action involves fewer risks, for it fills the interval between things and ourselves, whereas reflection dangerously widens it....So long as I give myself up to physical exercise, manual labor, I am happy, fulfilled; once I stop, I am seized by dizziness, and I can think of nothing but giving up for good.
The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.
I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.