Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
Every thought should recall the ruin of a smile.
"I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside." This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works on introspection.
"You really should come to the house - one of these days we might die without having seen each other again." - "Since we have to die in any case, what's the use of seeing each other again?"
It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.
Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream.
It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: in truth, it is itself the quintessence of injustice.
My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.
Friendship is a pact, a convention. Two beings tacitly promise never to broadcast what each really thinks of the other. A kind of alliance based on compromises. When one of them publicly calls attention to the other's defects, the pact is declared null and void, the alliance broken. No friendship lasts if one of the partners ceases to play the game. In other words, no friendship tolerates an exaggerated proportion of honesty.
What a pity that 'nothingness' has been devalued by an abuse of it made by philosophers unworthy of it!
Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.
The more indifferent I am to men, the more they trouble me; and when I scorn them, I cannot approach them without stammering.
Word — that invisible dagger.
When we are fixated on doubt, we take more pleasure in lavishing speculations upon it than in practicing it.
One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.
When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment.
Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!
To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.
What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.
I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide.