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I Have Tried To Protect Myself Against Men, To React Against Their Madness To Discern Its Source; I Have Listened And I Have Seen--and I Have Been Afraid Of Acting For The Same Motives Or For Any Motive Whatever, Of Believing In The Same Ghosts Or In Any Other Ghost, Of Letting Myself Be Engulfed By The Same Intoxications Or By Some Other... Afraid, In Short, Of Raving In Common And Of Expiring In A Horde Of Ecstasies.

-Emile M. Cioran

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I Have Tried To

Emile M. Cioran

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I Have Tried To Protect Myself Against Men, To React Against Their Madness To Discern Its Source; I Have Listened And I Have Seen--and I Have Been Afraid Of Acting For The Same Motives Or For Any Motive Whatever, Of Believing In The Same Ghosts Or In Any Other Ghost, Of Letting Myself Be Engulfed By The Same Intoxications Or By Some Other... Afraid, In Short, Of Raving In Common And Of Expiring In A Horde Of Ecstasies.

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I Am The Beast With A Contorted Grin, Contracting Down To Illusion And Dilating Toward Infinity, Both Growing And Dying, Delightfully Suspended Between Hope For Nothing And Despair Of Everything, Brought Up Among Perfumes And Poisons, Consumed With Love And Hatred, Killed By Lights And Shadows. My Symbol Is Death Of Light And The Flame Of Death. Sparks Die In Me Only To Be Reborn As Thunder And Lightning. Darkness Itself Glows In Me.

Do I Look Like Someone Who Has Something To Do Here On Earth?' —that's What I'd Like To Answer The Busybodies Who Inquire Into My Activities.

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.

Who Rebels? Who Rises In Arms? Rarely The Slave, But Almost Always The Oppressor Turned Slave.

How Good Would It Be If One Could Die By Throwing Oneself Into An Infinite Void.

Word - That Invisible Dagger.

A Book Has To Dig Through The Wounds, More, It Has Cause A New One, A Book It Has To Be Dangerous.

The Refutation Of Suicide: Is It Not Inelegant To Abandon A World Which Has So Willingly Put Itself At The Service Of Our Melancholy?

Read Day And Night, Devour Books - These Sleeping Pills - Not To Know But To Forget! Through Books You Can Retrace Your Way Back To The Origins Of Spleen, Discarding History And Its Illusions.

The True Hero Fights And Dies In The Name Of His Destiny, And Not In The Name Of A Belief.

If We Had The Courage To Confront The Doubts We Timidly Conceive About Ourselves, None Of Us Would Utter An 'i' Without Shame.

Tolerance - The Function Of An Extinguished Ardor - Tolerance Cannot Seduce The Young.

Jealousy - That Jumble Of Secret Worship And Ostensible Aversion.

What A Pity That 'nothingness' Has Been Devalued By An Abuse Of It Made By Philosophers Unworthy Of It!

To Claim You Are More Detached, More Alien To Everything Than Anyone, And To Be Merely A Fanatic Of Indifference!

I Live Only Because It Is In My Power To Die When I Choose To: Without The Idea Of Suicide, I'd Have Killed Myself Right Away.

The Mind Is The Result Of The Torments The Flesh Undergoes Or Inflicts Upon Itself.

In Order To Have The Stuff Of A Tyrant, A Certain Mental Derangement Is Necessary.

Consider Love: Is There A Nobler Outpouring, A Rapture Less Suspect? Its Shudders Rival Music, Compete With The Tears Of Solitude And Of Ecstasy: Sublime...but A Sublimity Inseperable From The Urinary Tract: Transports Bordering Upon Excretion, A Heaven Of The Glands, Sudden Sancitity Of The Orifices. It Takes No More Than A Moment Of Attention For This Intoxication, Shaken, To Cast You Back Into The Ordures Of Physiology Or A Moment Of Fatigue To Recognize That So Much Ardor Produces Only A Variety Of Mucous.

As Long As One Believes In Philosophy, One Is Healthy; Sickness Begins When One Starts To Think.

There Is No Limit To Suffering.

We Change Ideas Like Neckties.

Negation Is The Mind's First Freedom, Yet A Negative Habit Is Fruitful Only So Long As We Exert Ourselves To Overcome It, Adapt It To Our Needs; Once Acquired It Can Imprison Us.

Show Me One Thing Here On Earth Which Has Begun Well And Not Ended Badly. The Proudest Palpitations Are Engulfed In A Sewer, Where They Cease Throbbing, As Though Having Reached Their Natural Term: This Downfall Constitutes The Heart's Drama And The Negative Meaning Of History.

Psychoanalysis Is A Technique We Practice At Our Cost; Psychoanalysis Degrades Our Risks, Our Dangers, Our Depths; It Strips Us Of Our Impurities, Of All That Made Us Curious About Ourselves.

The Need For Novelty Is The Characteristic Of An Alienated Gorilla.

We Define Only Out Of Despair, We Must Have A Formula... To Give A Facade Tot He Void.

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.

In Most Cases We Attach Ourselves To In Order To Take Revenge On Life, To Punish It, To Signify We Can Do Without It, That We Have Found Something Better, And We Also Attach Ourselves To God In Horror Of Men.

Afflicted With Existence, Each Man Endures Like An Animal The Consequences Which Proceed From It. Thus, In A World Where Everything Is Detestable, Hatred Becomes Huger Than The World And, Having Transcended Its Object, Cancels Itself Out.

Crime In Full Glory Consolidates Authority By The Sacred Fear It Inspires.

The Deepest Subjective Experiences Are Also The Most Universal, Because Through Them One Reaches The Universal Source Of Life.

We Are Afraid Of The Enormity Of The Possible.

Is It Possible That Existence Is Our Exile And Nothingness Our Home?

A Man Who Fears Ridicule Will Never Go Far, For Good Or Ill: He Remains On This Side Of This Talents, And Even If He Has Genius, He Is Doomed To Mediocrity.

Since All Life Is Futility, Then The Decision To Exist Must Be The Most Irrational Of All.

Futility Of Life

For You Who No Longer Possess It, Freedom Is Everything, For Us Who Do, It Is Merely An Illusion.

Each Of Us Must Pay For The Slightest Damage He Inflicts Upon A Universe Created For Indifference And Stagnation, Sooner Or Later, He Will Regret Not Having Left It Intact.

We Must Learn How To Explode! Any Disease Is Healthier Than The One Provoked By A Hoarded Rage.

Were We To Undertake An Exhaustive Self-scrutiny, Disgust Would Paralyze Us, We Would Be Doomed To A Thankless Existence.

In Every Man Sleeps A Prophet, And When He Wakes There Is A Little More Evil In The World.

Losing Love Is So Rich A Philosophical Ordeal That It Makes A Hairdresser Into A Rival Of Socrates.

I Saw That Philosophy Had No Power To Make My Life More Bearable. Thus I Lost My Belief In Philosophy.

History Proves Nothing Because It Contains Everything.

Where Are My Sensations? They Have Melted Into... Me, And What Is This Me, This Self, But The Sum Of These Evaporated Sensations?

It Is Enough For Me To Hear Someone Talk Sincerely About Ideals, About The Future, About Philosophy, To Hear Him Say “we" With A Certain Inflection Of Assurance, To Hear Him Invoke "others" And Regard Himself As Their Interpreter - For Me To Consider Him My Enemy.

Skepticism Is The Sadism Of Embittered Souls.

Only Optimists Commit Suicide, Optimists Who No Longer Succeed At Being Optimists. The Others, Having No Reason To Live, Why Would They Have Any To Die?

We Have Convictions Only If We Have Studied Nothing Thoroughly.

What Are You Waiting For In Order To Give Up?

No Matter Which Way We Go, It Is No Better Than Any Other. It Is All The Same Whether You Achieve Something Or Not, Have Faith Or Not, Just As It Is All The Same Whether You Cry Or Remain Silent.

The Sole Means Of Protecting Your Solitude Is To Offend Everyone, Beginning With Those You Love.

A Marvel That Has Nothing To Offer, Democracy Is At Once A Nation's Paradise And Its Tomb.

It Is Because We Are All Impostors That We Endure Each Other. The Man Who Does Not Consent To Lie Will See The Earth Shrink Under His Feet: We Are Biologically Obliged To The False

Not To Be Born Is Undoubtedly The Best Plan Of All. Unfortunately, It Is Within No One's Reach.

Best Laid Plans

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.

To Act Is To Anchor In An Imminent Future, So Imminent It Becomes Almost Tangible; To Act Is To Feel You Are Consubstantial With That Future.

The Capital Phenomenon, The Most Catastrophic Disaster, Is Uninterrupted Sleeplessness, That Nothingness Without Release.

To Devastate By Language, To Blow Up The Word And With It The World.

We Are All Deep In A Hell Each Moment Of Which Is A Miracle.

No One Recovers From The Disease Of Being Born, A Deadly Wound If There Ever Was One.

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.

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.

No One Should Forget: Eros Alone Can Fulfill Life; Knowledge, Never. Only Eros Makes Sense; Knowledge Is Empty Infinity; – For Thoughts, There Is Always Time; Life Has Its Time; There Is No Thought That Comes Too Late; Any Desire Can Become A Regret.

Under Each Formula Lies A Corpse.

Torment, For Some Men, Is A Need, An Appetite, And An Accomplishment.

The Wise Man, The Sage, Is Hostile To The New. Disabused, He Abdicates: That Is His Form Of Protest.

I Lost My Sleep, And This Is The Greatest Tragedy That Can Befall Someone. It Is Much Worse Than Sitting In Prison.

An Individual Dies ... When, Instead Of Taking Risks And Hurling Himself Toward Being, He Cowers Within, And Takes Refuge There.

Every Thought Should Recall The Ruin Of A Smile.

Life Inspires More Dread Than Death - It Is Life Which Is The Great Unknown.

There Is Only One Thing Worse Than Boredom, And That Is The Fear Of Boredom.

Man Must Vanquish Himself, Must Do Himself Violence, In Order To Perform The Slightest Action Untainted By Evil.

The Truly Solitary Being Is Not The Man Who Is Abandoned By Men, But The Man Who Suffers In Their Midst, Who Drags His Desert Through The Marketplace And Deploys His Talents As A Smiling Leper, A Mountebank Of The Irreparable.

We Cannot Be Normal And Alive At The Same Time.

Life Creates Itself In Delirium And Is Undone In Ennui.

Delirium Tremens

We Must Suffer To The End, To The Moment When We Stop Believing In Suffering.

Not One Moment When I Have Not Been Conscious Of Being Outside Paradise.

My Mission Is To Kill Time, And Time's To Kill Me In Its Turn. How Comfortable One Is Among Murderers.

We Dread The Future Only When We Are Not Sure We Can Kill Ourselves When We Want To.

Think Of God And Not Religion, Of Ecstasy And Not Mysticism. The Difference Between The Theoretician Of Faith And The Believer Is As Great As Between The Psychiatrist And The Psychotic.

The Universal View Melts Things Into A Blur.

One Cannot Live Without Motives. I Have No Motives Left, And I Am Living.

What Every Man Who Loves His Country Hopes For In His Inmost Heart: The Suppression Of Half His Compatriots.

I Am Like A Broken Puppet Whose Eyes Have Fallen Inside.

Progress Is The Injustice Each Generation Commits With Regard To Its Predecessors.

A Civilization Is Destroyed Only When Its Gods Are Destroyed.

To Live Entirely Without A Goal! I Have Glimpsed This State, And Have Often Attained It, Without Managing To Remain There: I Am Too Weak For Such Happiness.

I Would Like To Explode, Flow, Crumble Into Dust, And My Disintegration Would Be My Masterpiece.

Sometimes I Wish I Were A Cannibal – Less For The Pleasure Of Eating Someone Than For The Pleasure Of Vomiting Him.

No Position Is So False As Having Understood And Still Remaining Alive.

I Have Decided Not To Oppose Anyone Ever Again, Since I Have Noticed That I Always End By Resembling My Latest Enemy.

Once You See That Everything Is Unreal, You Can't See Why You Should Bother To Prove It.

Melancholy: An Appetite No Misery Satisfies.

To Think Is To Take A Cunning Revenge In Which We Camouflage Our Baseness And Conceal Our Lower Instincts.

Only One Thing Matters: Learning To Be The Loser.

Melancholy Redeems This Universe, And Yet It Is Melancholy That Separates Us From It.

Imaginary Pains Are By Far The Most Real We Suffer, Since We Feel A Constant Need For Them And Invent Them Because There Is No Way Of Doing Without Them.

The Premonition Of Madness Is Complicated By The Fear Of Lucidity In Madness, The Fear Of The Moments Of Return And Reunion... One Would Welcome Chaos If One Were Not Afraid Of Lights In It.

Trees Are Massacred, Houses Go Up — Faces, Faces Everywhere. Man Is Spreading. Man Is The Cancer Of The Earth.

After Having Struggled Madly To Solve All Problems, After Having Suffered On The Heights Of Despair, In The Supreme Hour Of Revelation, You Will Find That The Only Answer, The Only Reality, Is Silence.

Nostalgia, More Than Anything, Gives Us The Shudder Of Our Own Imperfection. This Is Why With Chopin We Feel So Little Like Gods.

To Read Is To Let Someone Else Work For You - The Most Delicate Form Of Exploitation.

We Derive Our Vitality From Our Store Of Madness.

Those Who Believe In Their Truth -- The Only Ones Whose Imprint Is Retained By The Memory Of Men -- Leave The Earth Behind Them Strewn With Corpses. Religions Number In Their Ledgers More Murders Than The Bloodiest Tyrannies Account For, And Those Whom Humanity Has Called Divine Far Surpass The Most Conscientious Murderers In Their Thirst For Slaughter.

Speech And Silence. We Feel Safer With A Madman Who Talks Than With One Who Cannot Open His Mouth.

Music Is The Refuge Of Souls Ulcerated By Happiness.

By All Evidence We Are In The World To Do Nothing.

Far From Diminishing The Appetite For Power, Suffering Exasperates It.

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.

Even When Nothing Happens, Everything Seems Too Much For Me. What Can Be Said, Then, In The Presence Of An Event, Any Event?

If Truth Were Not Boring, Science Would Have Done Away With God Long Ago. But God As Well As The Saints Is A Means To Escape The Dull Banality Of Truth.

A People Represents Not So Much An Aggregate Of Ideas And Theories As Of Obsessions.

Ideas Should Be Neutral. But Man Animates Them With His Passions And Folly. Impure And Turned Into Beliefs, They Take On The Appearance Of Reality. The Passage From Logic Is Consummated. Thus Are Born Ideologies, Doctrines, And Bloody Farce.

Life Without Utopia Is Suffocating, For The Multitude At Least: Threatened Otherwise With Petrifaction, The World Must Have A New Madness.

What Necessity Impels A Writer Who Has Produced Fifty Books To Write Still One More? Why This Proliferation, This Fear Of Being Forgotten, This Debased Coquetry?

What To Think Of Other People? I Ask Myself This Question Each Time I Make A New Acquaintance. So Strange Does It Seem To Me That We Exist, And That We Consent To Exist.

I Don’t Understand Why We Must Do Things In This World, Why We Must Have Friends And Aspirations, Hopes And Dreams. Wouldn’t It Be Better To Retreat To A Faraway Corner Of The World, Where All Its Noise And Complications Would Be Heard No More? Then We Could Renounce Culture And Ambitions; We Would Lose Everything And Gain Nothing; For What Is There To Be Gained From This World?

We Are So Lonely In Life That We Must Ask Ourselves If The Loneliness Of Dying Is Not A Symbol Of Our Human Existence.

So Long As Man Is Protected By Madness - He Functions - And Flourishes.

"the Holy Ghost," Luther Instructs Us, "is Not A Skeptic." Not Everyone Can Be, And That Is Really Too Bad.

I Do Not Forgive Myself For Being Born. It Is As If Creeping Into This World, I Had Profaned A Mystery, Betrayed Some Momentous Pledge, Committed A Fault Of Nameless Gravity.

Every Profound Dissatisfaction Is Of A Religious Nature: Our Failures Derive From Our Incapacity To Conceive Of Paradise And To Aspire To It, As Our Discomforts From The Fragility Of Our Relations With The Absolute.

I Have All The Defects Of Other People Yet Everything They Do Seems To Me Inconceivable.

You Are Done For - A Living Dead Man - Not When You Stop Loving But Stop Hating. Hatred Preserves: In It, In Its Chemistry, Resides The Mystery Of Life.

It Is Not Worth The Bother Of Killing Yourself, Since You Always Kill Yourself Too Late.

Suffering Makes You Live Time In Detail, Moment After Moment. Which Is To Say That It Exists For You: Over The Others, The Ones Who Don't Suffer, Time Flows, So That They Don't Live In Time, In Fact They Never Have.

Every Thought Derives From A Thwarted Sensation.

Life Is Possible Only By The Deficiencies Of Our Imagination And Memory.

Our Works, Whatever They May Be, Derive From Our Incapacity To Kill Or To Kill Ourselves.

Boredom Dismantles The Mind, Renders It Superficial, Out At The Seams, Saps It From Within And Dislocates It.

I Foresee The Day When We Shall Read Nothing But Telegrams And Prayers.

To Live Signifies To Believe And Hope - To Lie And To Lie To Oneself.

Vague A L'ame - Melancholy Yearning For The End Of The World.

It Is An Understatement To Say That In This Society Injustices Abound: In Truth, It Is Itself The Quintessence Of Injustice.

Philosophy Is A Corrective Against Sadness. Yet There Still Are People Who Believe In The Profundity Of Philosophy!

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.

Wisdom Disguises Our Wounds; It Teaches Us How To Bleed In Secret.

Society: An Inferno Of Saviors!

An Existence Transfigured By Failure.

True Moral Elegance Consists In The Art Of Disguising One's Victories As Defeats.

Knowledge Subverts Love: In Proportion As We Penetrate Our Secrets, We Come To Loathe Our Kind, Precisely Because They Resemble Us.

Tears Do Not Burn Except In Solitude.

To Exist Is Equivalent To An Act Of Faith, A Protest Against The Truth, An Interminable Prayer. As Soon As They Consent To Live, The Unbeliever And The Man Of Faith Are Fundamentally The Same, Since Both Have Made The Only Decision That Defines A Being.

What Can Be Said, Lacks Reality. Only What Fails To Make Its Way Into Words Exists And Counts.

The Deepest And Most Organic Death Is Death In Solitude, When Even Light Becomes A Principle Of Death. In Such Moments You Will Be Severed From Life, From Love, Smiles, Friends And Even From Death. And You Will Ask Yourself If There Is Anything Besides The Nothingness Of The World And Your Own Nothingness.

Hungarian Language — Savage It May Be But Of A Beauty That Has Nothing Human About It, With Sonorities Of Another Universe, Powerful And Corrosive, Appropriate To Prayer, To Groans And To Tears, Risen Out Of Hell To Perpetuate Its Accent And Its Aura…words Of Nectar And Cyanide.

A Regret Understood By No One: The Regret To Be A Pessimist. It’s Not Easy To Be On The Wrong Foot With Life.

We Die In Proportion To The Words We Fling Around Us.

Freedom Can Be Manifested Only In The Void Of Beliefs, In The Absence Of Axioms, And Only Where The Laws Have No More Authority Than A Hypothesis.

I Feel Completely Detached From Any Country, Any Group. I Am A Metaphysically Displaced Person

The Fact That Life Has No Meaning Is A Reason To Live - Moreover, The Only One.

Meaning Of Life

A Sudden Silence In The Middle Of A Conversation Suddenly Brings Us Back To Essentials: It Reveals How Dearly We Must Pay For The Invention Of Speech.

A Sensation Must Have Fallen Very Low To Deign To Turn Into An Idea.

I'm Simply An Accident. Why Take It All So Seriously?

There Is Not Much Difference Between A Mortal Man And A Dying Man. The Absurdity Of Making Plans Is Only Slightly More Obvious In The Second Case.

To Venture Upon An Undertaking Of Any Kind, Even The Most Insignificant, Is To Sacrifice To Envy.

To Exist Is A Habit I Do Not Despair Of Acquiring.

To Possess A High Degree Of Consciousness, To Be Always Aware Of Yourself In Relation To The World, To Live In The Permanent Tension Of Knowledge, Means To Be Lost For Life.

An Aphorism? Fire Without Flames. Understandable That No One Tries To Warm Himself At It.

To Act Is To Anchor In The Imminent Future.

Truths Begin By A Conflict With The Police - And End By Calling Them In.

We Interest Others By The Misfortune We Spread Around Us.

To Live In Any True Sense Of The Word Is To Reject Others; To Accept Them, One Must Be Able To Renounce, To Do Oneself Violence, To Act Against One's Own Nature, To Weaken Oneself; We Conceive Freedom Only For Ourselves - We Extend It To Our Neighbours Only At The Cost Of Exhausting Efforts; Whence The Precariousness Of Liberalism, A Defiance Of Our Instincts, A Brief And Miraculous Success, A State Of Exception, At The Antipodes Of Our Deepest Imperatives.

Man Starts Over Again Everyday, In Spite Of All He Knows, Against All He Knows.

Discretion Is Deadly To Genius; Ruinous To Talent.

Anyone Can Escape Into Sleep, We Are All Geniuses When We Dream, The Butcher's The Poet's Equal There.

Time Is Heavy Sometimes; Imagine How Heavy Eternity Must Be.

However Much I Have Frequented The Mystics, Deep Down I Have Always Sided With The Devil; Unable To Equal Him In Power, I Have Tried To Be Worthy Of Him, At Least, In Insolence, Acrimony, Arbitrariness And Caprice.

On Creating — What We Crave, What We Want To See In Others Eyes, Is That Servile Expression, An Unconcealed Infatuation With Our Gestures.

I Dream Of A Language Whose Words, Like Fists, Would Fracture Jaws.

If I Were To Be Totally Sincere, I Would Say That I Do Not Know Why I Live And Why I Do Not Stop Living. The Answer Probably Lies In The Irrational Character Of Life Which Maintains Itself Without Reason.

When You Have Understood That Nothing Is, That Things Do Not Even Deserve The Status Of Appearances, You No Longer Need To Be Saved, You Are Saved, And Miserable Forever.

If Each Of Us Were To Confess His Most Secret Desire, The One That Inspires All His Plans, All His Actions, He Would Say: "i Want To Be Praised."

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.

Tragic Paradox Of Freedom: The Mediocre Men Who Alone Make Its Exercise Possible Cannot Guarantee Its Duration.

Mind, Even More Deadly To Empires Than To Individuals, Erodes Them, Compromises Their Solidity.

Humanity Adores Only Those Who Cause It To Perish.

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.

The More One Has Suffered, The Less One Demands. To Protest Is A Sign One Has Traversed No Hell.

Our First Intuitions Are The True Ones.

You Cannot Protect Your Solitude If You Cannot Make Yourself Odious.

History Is Nothing But A Procession Of False Absolutes, A Series Of Temples Raised To Pretexts, A Degradation Of The Mind Before The Improbable.

The Multiplication Of Our Kind Borders On The Obscene; The Duty To Love Them, On The Preposterous.

When People Come To Me Saying They Want To Kill Themselves, I Tell Them, "what’s Your Rush? You Can Kill Yourself Any Time You Like. So Calm Down. Suicide Is A Positive Act." And They Do Calm Down.

Self-conscious Rejection Of The Absolute Is The Best Way To Resist God; Thus Illusion, The Substance Of Life, Is Saved.

Only One Endowed With Restless Vitality Is Susceptible To Pessimism. You Become A Pessimist-a Demonic, Elemental, Bestial Pessimist-only When Life Has Been Defeated Many Times In Its Fight Against Depression.

To Foreswear Vengeance Is To Chain Oneself To Forgiveness, To Flounder In Pardon, To Be Tainted By The Hatred Smothered Within.

We Are All Geniuses When We Dream.

Try To Be Free: You Will Die Of Hunger.

What Pride To Discover That Nothing Belongs To You - What A Revelation.

What Do You Do From Morning To Night?" "i Endure Myself.

We Inhabit A Language Rather Than A Country.

If, At The Limit, You Can Rule Without Crime, You Cannot Do So Without Injustices.

In A Republic, That Paradise Of Debility, The Politician Is A Petty Tyrant Who Obeys The Laws.

That History Just Unfolds, Independently Of A Specified Direction, Of A Goal, No One Is Willing To Admit.

Every Form Of Talent Involves A Certain Shameless-ness.

The History Of Ideas Is The History Of The Grudges Of Solitary Men.

To Defy Heredity Is To Defy Billions Of Years, To Defy The First Cell

I Never Met One Interesting Mind That Was Not Richly Endowed With Inadmissible Deficiencies.

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