Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.
He who hates himself is not humble.
For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
Everyone is mistaken, everyone lives in illusion. At best, we can admit a scale of fictions, a hierarchy of unrealities, giving preference to one rather than to another; but to chose, no, definitely not that...
There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books.
We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
It is not be genius, it is by suffering, and suffering alone, that one ceases to be a marionette.
A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.
"What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself."
The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them.
What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name — and moving on.
History shows that the thinkers who mounted on the top of the ladder of questions, who set their foot on the last rung, that of the absurd, have bequesthed to posterity only an example of sterility.
To think is to take a cunning revenge in which we camouflage our baseness and conceal our lower instincts.
To think that so many have succeeded in dying!
What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.
I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul.
To have committed every crime but that of being a father.
I am displeased with everything. If they made me God, I would immediately resign.
In the long run, tolerance breeds more ills than intolerance. If this is true, it constitutes the most serious accusation that can be made against man.