Emil Cioran

As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad.

History proves nothing because it contains everything.

History shows that the thinkers who mounted on the top of the ladder of questions, who set their foot on the last rung, that of the absurd, have bequeathed to posterity only an example of sterility.

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

Vague a l'ame — melancholy yearning for the end of the world.

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.

Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.