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.
Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.
A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse.
What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.
There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books.
I am displeased with everything. If they made me God, I would immediately resign.
To have committed every crime but that of being a father.
I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul.
What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.
To think that so many have succeeded in dying!
To think is to take a cunning revenge in which we camouflage our baseness and conceal our lower instincts.
History shows that the thinkers who mounted on the top of the ladder of questions, who set their foot on the last rung, that of the absurd, have bequesthed to posterity only an example of sterility.
What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name — and moving on.
The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them.
"What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself."
A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.
It is not be genius, it is by suffering, and suffering alone, that one ceases to be a marionette.
We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
To love one's neighbor is inconceivable. Does one ask a virus to love another virus?
Only the idiot is equipped to breathe.