Emil Cioran
Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?
Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.
A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.
To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel you are consubstantial with that future.
The Universal view melts things into a blur.
Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.
A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
Word - that invisible dagger.
I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.
A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.
We inhabit a language rather than a country.
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.
Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
Everything is pathology, except for indifference.
However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.
Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.