Emil M. Cioran

"The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death."

"The one who had not ever conceived his own annulment, who had not foreseen the resource of the cord, the bullet, the poison or the sea, is a debased prisoner or a crawling worm on the cosmic carrion. This world can take off us everything, it can forbid us everything, but nobody can't prevent us our self-abolition."

"We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job..."

"Compassion is a sign of superficiality: broken destinies and unrelenting misery either make you scream or turn you to stone."

"The sense that everything is going wrong has existed in every era, and rightly so since men have found no greater pleasure than in inventing new ways to make each other miserable."

"I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers."

"For the normal man, life is an undisputed reality; only the sick man is delighted by life and praises it so that he won't collapse."

"If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing it. Becoming: an agony without an ending. The older I grow, the less I enjoy performing my little Hamlet. The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death. If History had a goal, how lamentable would be the fate of those of us who have accomplished nothing!On the frontiers of the self: ‘What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I’. Events - tumours of time. Man secretes disaster. The secret of my adaptation to life? - I’ve changed despairs the way I’ve changed shirts. Each day is a Rubicon in which I aspire to be drowned."

"If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God."

"Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact."

"By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing."

"It is no sign of benediction to have been obsessed with the lives of saints, for it is an obsession intertwined with a taste for maladies and hunger for depravities. One only troubles oneself with saints because one has been disappointed by the paradoxes of earthly life; one therefore searches out other paradoxes, more outlandish in guise, redolent of unknown truths, unknown perfumes..."

"A book is a suicide postponed."

"What are the occupations of the sage? He resigns himself to seeing, to eating, etc…., he accepts in spite of himself this “wound with nine openings,” which is what the Bhagavad-Gita calls the body.―Wisdom? To undergo with dignity the humiliation inflicted upon us by our holes."

"Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic."

"Tristetea, ca si suferinta, ne revela existenta, deoarece în ele avem în constiinta separatia noastra de lumea obiectiva si nelinistea care da un caracter tragic vietuirii în existenta. Daca ar exista un zeu al tristetii, lui nu i-ar putea creste decât aripi negre si grele, pentru a zbura nu înspre ceruri, ci în infern."

"The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live-moreover, the only one."

"The only successful philosophies and religions are the ones that flatter us, whether in the name of progress or of hell. Damned or not, man experiences an absolute need to be at the heart of everything."

"Nothing sweeter than to drag oneself along behind events; and nothing more reasonable. But without a strong dose of madness, no initiative, no enterprise, no gesture. Reason: the rust of our vitality. It is the madman in us who forces us to adventure; once he abandons us, we are lost; everything depends on him, even our vegetative life; it is he who invites us, who obliges us to breathe, and it is also he who forces our blood to venture through our veins. Once he withdraws, we are alone indeed! We cannot be normal and alive at the same time."

"I try--without success--to stop finding reasons for vanity in anything. When I happen to manage it nonetheless, I feel that I no longer belong to the mortal gang. I am above everything then, above the gods themselves. Perhaps that is what death is: a sensation of great, of extreme superiority."