Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
Tolerance — the function of an extinguished ardor — tolerance cannot seduce the young.
Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion.
One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
To think is to run after insecurity, to be demoralized for grandiose trifles, to immure oneself in abstractions with a martyr's avidity, to hunt up complications the way others pursue collapse or gain. The thinker is by definition keen for torment.
Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.
I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide...
The need for remorse which precedes wrongdoing, which actually creates it...
Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.
We suffer: the external world begins to exist...; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality.
What is marvelous is that each day brings us a new reason to disappear.
Thanks to depression - that alpinism of the indolent - we scale every summit and daydream over every precipice from our bed.
To go still further than Buddha, to raise oneself above Nirvana, to learn to do without it..., to be stopped by nothing, not even the notion of deliverance, regarding it as a mere way-station, an embarrassment, an eclipse...
There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.
After thirty, one should be no more interested in events than an astronomer in gossip.
Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral…
To have grazed every form of failure, including success.
It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the Earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to be false.
There is no limit to suffering.
This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique - and insignificant.
In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.