Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action - mother of all vices - I am the cause of no one's suffering.
Suffering, even as it undermines our strength, augments our pride. Our enemy assumes our defense.
We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
Had I listened to my impulses, I should be, today, unhinged or hanged.
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?
I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.
The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.
Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
Between the demand to be clear and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect.
One disgust, then another - to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind...The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive.
We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.
Vehement by nature, vacillating by choice. Which way to tend? Which whom to side? What self to join?
If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned — a saint or a corpse.
Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.
The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?
How can you know if you are in the truth? The criterion is simple enough: if others make a vacuum around you, there is not a doubt in the world that you are closer to the essential than they are.
The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous.