Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which has spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations.
If I were to conform to my most intimate convictions, I should cease to take any action whatever, to react in any way. But I am still capable of sensations...
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.
Kill yourself because you are what you are, but not because all humanity would spit in your face!
There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.
As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad.
Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.
He was above all others, and had had nothing to do with it: he had simply forgotten to desire...
Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.
The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world.
When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years.
Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!
The irritating thing about despair is its obviousness, its visibility, its "documentation": what is it but reportage? Consider hope, on the contrary - its generosity in what is false, its mania for affabulation, its rejection of the event: an aberration, a fiction. And it is in this aberration that life resides and upon this fiction that it feeds.
…all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint.
"Where do you get those superior airs of yours?" "I've managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?"
At a grave, the words: game, imposture, joke, dream, come to mind. Impossible to think that existence is a serious phenomenon. Certainty of faking from the start, at bottom. Over the gate of our cemeteries should be written: "Nothing is Tragic. Everything is Unreal."
Everything that lives makes noise. What an argument for the mineral kingdom!
The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.