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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.

-Emile M. Cioran

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The Truly Solitary Being

Emile M. Cioran

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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.

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

Maniacs Of Procreation, Bipeds With Devalued Faces, We Have Lost All Appeal For Each Other.

Every Word Affords Me Pain. Yet How Sweet It Would Be If I Could Hear What The Flowers Have To Say About Death!

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

The Art Of Love: Knowing How To Combine The Temperament Of A Vampire With The Discretion Of An Anemone.

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

Melancholy: An Appetite No Misery Satisfies.

I Would Like To Go Mad On One Condition, Namely, That I Would Become A Happy Madman, Lively And Always In A Good Mood, Without Any Troubles And Obsessions, Laughing Senselessly From Morning To Night.

As Art Sinks Into Paralysis, Artists Multiply. This Anomaly Ceases To Be One If We Realize That Art, On Its Way To Exhaustion, Has Become Both Impossible And Easy.

Never To Have Occasion To Take A Position, To Make Up One's Mind, Or To Define Oneself - There Is No Wish I Make More Often.

A Great Step Forward Was Made The Day Men Understood That In Order To Torment One Another More Efficiently They Would Have To Gather Together, To Organize Themselves Into A Society

What Surrounds Us We Endure Better For Giving It A Name - And Moving On.

We Are Afraid Of The Enormity Of The Possible.

Good Health Is The Best Weapon Against Religion. Healthy Bodies And Healthy Minds Have Never Been Shaken By Religious Fears.

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

True Confessions Are Written With Tears Only. But My Tears Would Drown The World, As My Inner Fire Would Reduce It To Ashes.

My Mission Is To Suffer For All Those Who Suffer Without Knowing It. I Must Pay For Them, Expiate Their Unconsciousness, Their Luck To Be Ignorant Of How Unhappy They Are.

What Is Pity But The Vice Of Kindness.

If We Could See Ourselves As Others See Us, We Would Vanish On The Spot.

I Do Nothing, Granted. But I See The Hours Pass - Which Is Better Than Trying To Fill Them.

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

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

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

I Have Always Struggled, With The Sole Intention Of Ceasing To Struggle. Result: Zero.

Alone, Even Doing Nothing, You Do Not Waste Your Time. You Do, Almost Always, In Company. No Encounter With Yourself Can Be Altogether Sterile: Something Necessarily Emerges, Even If Only The Hope Of Some Day Meeting Yourself Again.

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

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

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

We Interest Others By The Misfortune We Spread Around Us.

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

By Virtue Of Depression, We Recall Those Misdeeds We Buried In The Depths Of Our Memory. Depression Exhumes Our Shames.

The Obsession With Suicide Is Characteristic Of The Man Who Can Neither Live Nor Die, And Whose Attention Never Swerves From This Double Impossibility.

Anyone Who Speaks In The Name Of Others Is Always An Impostor.

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

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

Chaos Is Rejecting All You Have Learned, Chaos Is Being Yourself.

Chaos In The World

When We Cannot Be Delivered From Ourselves, We Delight In Devouring Ourselves.

The More Intense A Spiritual Leader's Appetite For Power, The More He Is Concerned To Limit It To Others.

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

To Accomplish Nothing And Die Of The Strain

Accomplish Nothing

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.

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

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

Every Thought Should Recall The Ruin Of A Smile.

One Is And Remains A Slave As Long As One Is Not Cured Of Hoping.

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.

To Get Up In The Morning, Wash And Then Wait For Some Unforeseen Variety Of Dread Or Depression. I Would Give The Whole Universe And All Of Shakespeare For A Grain Of Ataraxy.

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

Let Us Not Be Needlessly Bitter: Certain Failures Are Sometimes Fruitful.

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.

As The Years Pass, The Number Of Those We Can Communicate With Diminishes. When There Is No Longer Anyone To Talk To, At Last We Will Be As We Were Before Stooping To A Name.

Insomnia Is A Vertiginous Lucidity That Can Convert Paradise Itself Into A Place Of Torture.

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.

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

There Is No Limit To Suffering.

Every Thought Derives From A Thwarted Sensation.

There Was A Time When Time Did Not Yet Exist. … The Rejection Of Birth Is Nothing But The Nostalgia For This Time Before Time.

One Can Experience Loneliness In Two Ways: By Feeling Lonely In The World Or By Feeling The Loneliness Of The World.

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.

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

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

I Don’t Understand How People Can Believe In God, Even When I Myself Think Of Him Everyday.

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

What Are You Waiting For In Order To Give Up?

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.

Knowledge, Having Irritated And Stimulated Our Appetite For Power, Will Lead Us Inexorably To Our Ruin.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Under Each Formula Lies A Corpse.

Fear Can Supplant Our Real Problems Only To The Extent -unwilling Either To Assimilate Or To Exhaust It -we Perpetuate It Within Ourselves Like A Temptation And Enthrone It At The Very Heart Of Our Solitude.

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 Just Once You Were Depressed For No Reason, You Have Been So All Your Life Without Knowing.

In The Hours Without Sleep, Each Moment Is So Full And So Vacant That It Suggests Itself As A Rival Of Time.

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

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.

Pursued By Our Origins... We All Are.

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

What Is That One Crucifixion Compared To The Daily Kind Any Insomniac Endures?

I Cannot Contribute Anything To This World Because I Only Have One Method: Agony.

A Self-respecting Man Is A Man Without A Country. A Fatherland Is Birdlime.

Impossible To Spend Sleepless Nights And Accomplish Anything: If, In My Youth, My Parents Had Not Financed My Insomnias, I Should Surely Have Killed Myself.

Paradise Was Unendurable, Otherwise The First Man Would Have Adapted To It; This World Is No Less So, Since Here We Regret Paradise Or Anticipate Another One. What To Do? Where To Go? Do Nothing And Go Nowhere, Easy Enough.

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.

How Easy It Is To Be "deep": All You Have To Do Is Let Yourself Sink Into Your Own Flaws.

Jealousy - That Jumble Of Secret Worship And Ostensible Aversion.

Humanity Adores Only Those Who Cause It To Perish.

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

The Reaction Against Your Own Thought In Itself Lends Life To Thought. How This Reaction Is Born Is Hard To Describe, Because It Identifies With The Very Rare Intellectual Tragedies. The Tension, The Degree And Level Of Intensity Of A Thought Proceeds From Its Internal Antinomies, Which In Turn Are Derived From The Unsolvable Contradictions Of A Soul. Thought Cannot Solve The Contradictions Of The Soul. As Far As Linear Thinking Is Concerned, Thoughts Mirror Themselves In Other Thoughts, Instead Of Mirroring A Destiny.

All Great Ideas Should Be Followed By An Exclamation Mark - A Warning Signal Similar To The Skull And Crossbones Drawn On High-voltage Transformers.

Exclamation Marks

No Human Beings Are More Dangerous Than Those Who Have Suffered For A Belief

By What Aberration Has Suicide, The Only Truly Normal Action, Become The Attribute Of The Flawed?

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

The Amount Of Chiaroscuro An Idea Harbors Is The Only Index Of Its Profundity.

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

The Universal View Melts Things Into A Blur.

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

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

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

To Write Books Is To Have A Certain Relation With Original Sin. For What Is A Book If Not A Loss Of Innocence, An Act Of Aggression, A Repetition Of Our Fall?

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.

Try To Be Free: You Will Die Of Hunger.

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.

Between Ennui And Ecstasy Unwinds Our Whole Experience Of Time.

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

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

We Have Convictions Only If We Have Studied Nothing Thoroughly.

A Book Is A Suicide Postponed.

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

Skepticism Is The Elegance Of Anxiety.

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.

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

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.

A Civilization Is Destroyed Only When Its Gods Are Destroyed.

Revenge Is Not Always Sweet, Once It Is Consummated We Feel Inferior To Our Victim.

Only Superficial Minds Approach An Idea With Delicacy.

What Would Be Left Of Our Tragedies If An Insect Were To Present Us His?

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

Word - That Invisible Dagger.

Discretion Is Deadly To Genius; Ruinous To Talent.

The Fear Of Being Deceived Is The Vulgar Version Of The Quest For Truth.

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

Wherever We Go, We Come Up Against The Human, A Repulsive Ubiquity Before Which We Fall Into Stupor And Revolt, A Perplexity On Fire.

We Change Ideas Like Neckties.

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

True Contact Between Beings Is Established Only By Mute Presence, By Apparent Non-communication, By That Mysterious And Wordless Exchange Which Resembles Inward Prayer.

Much More Than Our Other Needs And Endeavors, It Is Sexuality That Puts Us On An Even Footing With Our Kind: The More We Practice It, The More We Become Like Everyone Else: It Is In The Performance Of A Reputedly Bestial Function That We Prove Our Status As Citizens: Nothing Is More Public Than The Sexual Act.

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

Best Laid Plans

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

Consciousness Is Nature's Nightmare.

The Only Free Mind Is One That, Pure Of All Intimacy With Beings Or Objects, Plies Its Own Vacuity.

He Who Hates Himself Is Not Humble.

We Have Lost, Being Born, As Much As We Shall Lose Dying: Everything!

All People See Fires, Storms, Explosions, Or Landscapes; But How Many Feel The Flames, The Lightnings, The Whirlwinds, Or The Harmony? How Many Have An Inner Beauty That Tinges Their Melancholy?

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

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

Tolerance Cannot Seduce The Young.

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

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

There Is No Means Of Proving It Is Preferable To Be Than Not To Be.

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

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.

We Cannot Consent To Be Judged By Someone Who Has Suffered Less Than Ourselves. And Since Each Of Us Regards Himself As An Unrecognized Job.

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

We Understand God By Everything In Ourselves That Is Fragmentary, Incomplete, And Inopportune.

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

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.

A Decadent Civilization Compromises With Its Disease, Cherishes The Virus Infecting It, Loses Its Self-respect.

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.

Basis Of Society: Anonymous Sweat.

Normal People Have Nothing To Forget.

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.

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

Illusion Begets And Sustains The World; We Do Not Destroy One Without Destroying The Other. Which Is What I Do Every Day. An Apparently Ineffectual Operation, Since I Must Begin All Over Again The Next Day.

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

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

Meaning Of Life

Everything Is Pathology, Except For Indifference.

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.

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.

History Proves Nothing Because It Contains Everything.

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

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

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

Better To Be An Animal Than A Man, An Insect Than An Animal, A Plant Than An Insect, And So On. Salvation? Whatever Diminishes The Kingdom Of Consciousness And Compromises Its Supremacy.

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

The Importance Of Insomnia Is So Colossal That I Am Tempted To Define Man As The Animal Who Cannot Sleep. Why Call Him A Rational Animal When Other Animals Are Equally Reasonable? But There Is Not Another Animal In The Entire Creation That Wants To Sleep Yet Cannot.

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

Just As Ecstasy Purifies You Of The Particular And The Contingent, Leaving Nothing Except Light And Darkness, So Insomnia Kills Off The Multiplicity And Diversity Of The World, Leaving You Prey To Your Private Obsessions.

Only One Thing Matters: Learning To Be The Loser.

I Seem To Myself, Among Civilized Men, An Intruder, A Troglodyte Enamored Of Decrepitude, Plunged Into Subversive Prayers.

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

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.

Man Started Out On The Wrong Foot. The Misadventure In Paradise Was The First Consequence. The Rest Had To Follow.

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.

We Cannot Be Normal And Alive At The Same Time.

To Want Fame Is To Prefer Dying Scorned Than Forgotten.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Tyrants Are Always Assassinated Too Late. That Is Their Great Excuse.

Transmitting One's Flaws [through Procreation] To Someone Else Is A Crime. I Could Never Consent To Give Life To Someone Who Would Inherent My Ailments.

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

By All Evidence We Are In The World To Do Nothing; But Instead Of Nonchalantly Promenading Our Own Corruption, We Exude Our Sweat And Grow Winded Upon The Fetid Air.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Democracy: A Festival Of Mediocrity.

A Garbled Quotation Is Equivalent To A Betrayal, An Insult, A Prejudice.

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?

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.

My Enthusiasms...constitute My Reserves, My Unexploited Resources, Perhaps My Future.

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.

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