Emil Cioran

He detested objective truths, the burden of argument, sustained reasoning. He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one. Others are a dialectician's invention.

Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.

What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.

Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.

I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.

It has been a long time since philosophers have read men's souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.

I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.

If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.

I am for the most part so convinced that everything is lacking in basis, consequence, justification, that if someone dared to contradict me, even the man I most admire, he would seem to me a charlatan or a fool.

The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know where that elsewhere is.

Though we may prefer ourselves to the universe, we nonetheless loathe ourselves much more than we suspect. If the wise man is so rare a phenomenon, it is because he seems unshaken by the aversion which, like all beings, he must feel for himself.