Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
Saints live in flames; wise men, next to them.
Of all that makes us suffer, nothing - so much as disappointment - gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.
Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.
Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.
Will man ever recover from the mortal blow he has delivered to life?
The moment we believe we've understood everything grants us the look of a murderer.
Two enemies - the same man divided.
Devouring biographies one after the next to be convinced of the futility of any undertaking, of any destiny.
Late at night. I feel like falling into a frenzy, doing some unprecedented thing to release myself, but I don't see against whom, against what...
Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.
What anxiety when one is not sure of one's doubts or wonders: are these actually doubts?
An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.
Death poses a problem which replaces all the others. What is deadly to philosophy, to the naive belief in the hierarchy of perplexities.
Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor and revolt, a perplexity on fire.
At different degrees, everything is pathology, except for indifference.
Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
Within the pessimist an ineffectual kindness connives with an unsatiated malice.
We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.
According to Sumerian mythology, the flood was the punishment the gods inflicted on man because of the noise he made. - What would I not give to know how they will reward him for today's racket?