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If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
Infirmity
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Everything
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Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?
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I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.
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No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.
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Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy!
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Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise.
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The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.
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I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.
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At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.
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In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
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The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty-the sideshow of second thoughts-is his rule he offers himself.
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The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.
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By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
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The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.
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Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
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We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.
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Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.
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The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
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Reality is a creation of our excesses.
Emile M. Cioran
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Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.
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Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
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