Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
Under each formula lies a corpse.
All philosophers should end their days at Pythia’s feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.
Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!
We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.
Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes - desertion after desertion.
Awareness of time: assault on time...
What is pity but the vice of kindness.
Only what you hide is profound, is true. Whence the power of base feelings.
God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.
No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity;––for thoughts, there is always time; life has its time; there is no thought that comes too late; any desire can become a regret.
One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.
The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.
My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.
Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?
Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself; I would have shared the dignity of the abandoned gods, defending them against the insidious crosses, the invasion of servants and martyrs, and would have spent my nights seeking repose in the dementia and debauchery of the Caesars. As an expert in disenchantment, I would have riddled the new zeals with all the arrows of dissolute wisdom — with courtesans, in skeptical brothels, or in circuses with lavish forms of cruelty. I would have filled my thinking with vice and blood to stretch logic to unheard of dimensions, as large as worlds that are dying.
I have wasted hour after hour ruminating upon what seemed to me eminently worthy of being explored - upon the vanity of all things, upon what does not deserve a second's reflection, since one does not see what there is still to be said for or against what is obvious.