Emil Cioran

One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.

We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character — precisely that and nothing more.

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.

The farther men get from God, the farther they advance into the knowledge of religions.

Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.

An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.

Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?

Late at night. I feel like falling into a frenzy, doing some unprecedented thing to release myself, but I don't see against whom, against what...

Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.

We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface...

The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.