Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.
Only optimists commit suicide, the optimists who can no longer be...optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?
Vague a l'ame — melancholy yearning for the end of the world.
If I were to go blind, what would bother me the most would be no longer to be able to stare idiotically at the passing clouds.
To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire.
All morning, I did nothing but repeat: "Man is an abyss, man is an abyss." - I could not, alas, find anything better.
Jealousy — that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.
The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.
Self-knowledge - the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?
Every action flatters the hyena within us.
By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.
Maniacs of Procreation, bipeds with devalued faces, we have lost all appeal for each other.
Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again.
As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.
If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?
This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.
Hope is the normal form of delirium.
There exists, I grant you, a clinical depression, upon which certain remedies occasionally have effect; but there exists another kind, a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself.
Pursued by our origins…we all are.
What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?