Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
Mental therapeutics abound among rich nations: the absence of immediate anxieties sustains a sickly climate. In order to preserve its nervous well-being, a nation needs a substantial disaster, an object for its afflictions, a positive terror justifying its complexes. Societies consolidate in danger and atrophy in neutrality. Where peace and hygiene and comfort flourish, psychoses multiply...I come from a country which, never having known happiness, has produced but one psychoanalyst.
The more disabused a man's mind, the more he risks, stricken by love, reacting like a schoolgirl.
Deep in his heart, man aspires to rejoin the condition he had before consciousness. History is merely the detour he takes to get there.
Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth...
What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!
In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left...with a foolish grin.
Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn't deserve to be known.
However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; - unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them...The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.
After a quarter of an hour, no one can observe another's despair without impatience.
Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.
Glory — once achieved, what is it worth?
When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.
Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
Try to be free: you will die of hunger.
If I were asked to summarize as briefly as possible my vision of things, to reduce it to its most succinct expression, I should replace words with an exclamation point, a definitive !
No longer ask me for my program: isn't breathing one?
Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.
If the skeptic admits that truth exists, he allows the innocent illusion of believing they will some day possess it. As for me, he declares, I abide by appearances, I note what they are and adhere to them only to the degree that, as a living being, I cannot do otherwise. I act like other people, I perform the same deeds they do, but I identify myself with neither my words nor my actions, I bow to customs and laws, I pretend to share the convictions, i.e., the prejudices of my fellow citizens, while knowing that in the last analysis I am quite as unreal as they are...What then is a skeptic? - A ghost: a conformist ghost.