Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?
Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!
If someone incessantly drops the word "life," you know he's a sick man.
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
Years and years to waken from that sleep in which the others loll; then years and years to escape that awakening...
To detach yourself elegantly from the world; to give contour and grace to sadness; a solitude in style; a walk that gives cadence to memories; stepping towards the intangible; with the breath in the trembling margins of things; the past reborn in the overflow of fragrances; the smell, through which we conquer time; the contour of the invisible things; the forms of the immaterial; to deepen yourself in the intangible; to touch the world airborne by smell; aerial dialogue and gliding dissolution; to bathe in your own reflecting fragmentation…
We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die. - Didn't you know that's how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?
The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.
Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.
Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves - that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it.
Buddhism calls anger "corruption of the mind," manicheism "root of the tree of death." I know this, but what good does it do me to know?
Beware of those who turn their backs on love, ambition, society. They will take their revenge for having renounced...
Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.
If you don't want to explode with rage, leave your memory alone, abstain from burrowing there.
You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.
We are all secularized anarchists today.
Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.
After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?
I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away.