Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
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.
After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?
Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.
We are all secularized anarchists today.
You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.
If you don't want to explode with rage, leave your memory alone, abstain from burrowing there.
Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.
Beware of those who turn their backs on love, ambition, society. They will take their revenge for having renounced...
My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.
What is pity but the vice of kindness.
Only what you hide is profound, is true. Whence the power of base feelings.
God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.
No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity;––for thoughts, there is always time; life has its time; there is no thought that comes too late; any desire can become a regret.
One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.
The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.
I have wasted hour after hour ruminating upon what seemed to me eminently worthy of being explored - upon the vanity of all things, upon what does not deserve a second's reflection, since one does not see what there is still to be said for or against what is obvious.
He who has not suffered is not a being; at most, a creature.
Consider love: is there a nobler outpouring, a rapture less suspect? Its shudders rival music, compete with the tears of solitude and of ecstasy: sublime...but a sublimity inseperable from the urinary tract: transports bordering upon excretion, a heaven of the glands, sudden sancitity of the orifices. It takes no more than a moment of attention for this intoxication, shaken, to cast you back into the ordures of physiology or a moment of fatigue to recognize that so much ardor produces only a variety of mucous.
To be sterile - with so many sensations! Perpetual poetry without words.
Awareness of time: assault on time...