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Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
Freedom
Guarantee
Cannot
Mediocre
Make
Paradox
Men
Guarantees
Tragic
Exercise
Alone
Possible
Duration

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To hope is to contradict the future.
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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.
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I have always struggled, with the sole intention of ceasing to struggle. Result: zero.
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This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique - and insignificant.
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Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
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Everything turns on pain the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.
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Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?
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Normal people have nothing to forget.
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True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.
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What do you do from morning to night? I endure myself.
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Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone.
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How easy it is to be deep: all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.
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The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.
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Utopia is the grotesque en rose, the need to associate happiness - that is, the improbable - with becoming, and to coerce an optimistic, aerial vision to the point where it rejoins its own source: the very cynicism it sought to combat. In short, a monstrous fantasy.
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Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.
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Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
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One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.
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Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.
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To think is to take a cunning revenge in which we camouflage our baseness and conceal our lower instincts.
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I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.
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