Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
To be sterile - with so many sensations! Perpetual poetry without words.
Consider love: is there a nobler outpouring, a rapture less suspect? Its shudders rival music, compete with the tears of solitude and of ecstasy: sublime...but a sublimity inseperable from the urinary tract: transports bordering upon excretion, a heaven of the glands, sudden sancitity of the orifices. It takes no more than a moment of attention for this intoxication, shaken, to cast you back into the ordures of physiology or a moment of fatigue to recognize that so much ardor produces only a variety of mucous.
He who has not suffered is not a being; at most, a creature.
"Everything is without basis, without substance," and I never repeat it to myself without feeling something like happiness. Unfortunately there are so many moments when I fail to repeat it to myself.
Consciousness is nature's nightmare.
No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.
To Live signifies to believe and hope — to lie and to lie to oneself.
"Neither this world, nor the next, nor happiness are for the being abandoned to doubt." - This point in the Gita is my death sentence.
Why does the Gita rank "renunciation of the fruit of actions" so high? Because such renunciation is rare, impracticable, contrary to our nature, and because achieving it is destroying the man one has been and one is, killing in oneself the entire past, the work of millennia - in a word, freeing oneself of the Species, that hideous and immemorial riffraff.
A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
To try curing someone of a "vice," of what is the deepest thing he has, is to attack his very being, and this is indeed how he himself understands it, since he will never forgive you for wanting him to destroy himself in your way and not his.
"Do I look like someone who has something to do here on Earth?" - That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.
A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society.
In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?
To repeat to yourself a thousand times a day: 'Nothing on Earth has any worth,' to keep finding yourself at the same point, to circle stupidly as a top, eternally...
Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.