Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know what that elsewhere is.
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I."
The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools.
As soon as one returns to Doubt (if it could be said that one has ever left it), undertaking anything at all seems not so much useless as extravagant. Doubt works deep within you like a disease, or even more effectively, like a faith.
The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it.
One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.
There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another.
When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.
Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
I want to proclaim a truth that would forever exile me from among the living. I know only the conditions but not the words that would allow me to formulate it.
When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment's thought to the "meaning" of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.
We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false.
The man who can no longer take sides because all men are necessarily right and wrong, because everything is at once justified and irrational - that man must renounce his own name, tread his identity underfoot, and begin a new life in impassibility and despair.
Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands?
Had I listened to my impulses, I should be, today, unhinged or hanged.