Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
To fear is to die every minute.
When you love someone, you hope - the more closely to be attached - that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.
To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!
We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.
That we can be wounded by the very people we despise discredits pride.
To create: only someone mistaken about himself, someone ignorant of the secret motives behind his actions, creates. Once the creator is transparent to himself, he no longer creates. Self-knowledge antagonizes the demon. Here is where we must seek out the reason Socrates wrote nothing.
Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.
Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.
"What's wrong - what's the matter with you?" Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for...
The pangs of truth about ourselves are more than we can endure. How pitiable the man (if such a being exists) who no longer lies to himself!
To act is to anchor in the imminent future.
I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.
Nothing is indefensible - from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime.
We always love...despite; and that "despite" covers an infinity.
I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.
We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface...
Lucidity does not extirpate the desire to live - far from it, lucidity merely makes us unsuited to life.
Without will, no conflict: no tragedy among the abulic. Yet the failure of will can be experienced more painfully than a tragic destiny.
The state of health is a state of nonsensation, even of nonreality. As soon as we cease to suffer, we cease to exist.
Noble gestures are always suspect. Each time, we regret having committed them. Something false about them, something theatrical, attitudinizing. It is true that we regret ignoble gestures about as much.