Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands?
The man who can no longer take sides because all men are necessarily right and wrong, because everything is at once justified and irrational - that man must renounce his own name, tread his identity underfoot, and begin a new life in impassibility and despair.
We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false.
Had I listened to my impulses, I should be, today, unhinged or hanged.
Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
Suffering, even as it undermines our strength, augments our pride. Our enemy assumes our defense.
I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action - mother of all vices - I am the cause of no one's suffering.
Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.
A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse.
What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.
What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you — what a revelation.
To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.
Of all calumnies the worst is the one which attacks our indolence, which contests its authenticity.
Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.
Only the idiot is equipped to breathe.
To love one's neighbor is inconceivable. Does one ask a virus to love another virus?
It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.
The Real gives me asthma.