Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.
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.
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?
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.
Maniacs of Procreation, bipeds with devalued faces, we have lost all appeal for each other.
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?
As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.
Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again.
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?