Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
What anxiety when one is not sure of one's doubts or wonders: are these actually doubts?
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.
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...
Devouring biographies one after the next to be convinced of the futility of any undertaking, of any destiny.
Two enemies - the same man divided.
The moment we believe we've understood everything grants us the look of a murderer.
After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?
Beware of those who turn their backs on love, ambition, society. They will take their revenge for having renounced...
Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.
If you don't want to explode with rage, leave your memory alone, abstain from burrowing there.
You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.
We are all secularized anarchists today.
Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.
Saints live in flames; wise men, next to them.
Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.
Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.
Of all that makes us suffer, nothing - so much as disappointment - gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.
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?
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away.