Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment's thought to the "meaning" of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.
I want to proclaim a truth that would forever exile me from among the living. I know only the conditions but not the words that would allow me to formulate it.
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.
When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.
There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another.
One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.
The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it.
As soon as one returns to Doubt (if it could be said that one has ever left it), undertaking anything at all seems not so much useless as extravagant. Doubt works deep within you like a disease, or even more effectively, like a faith.
The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools.
On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I."
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.
A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know what that elsewhere is.
If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.
Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.
I know peace only when my ambitions sleep. Once they waken, anxiety repossesses me. Life is a state of ambition. The mole digging his tunnels is ambitious. Ambition is in effect everywhere, and we see its traces on the faces of the dead themselves.
True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.