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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.

-Emile M. Cioran

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Those Who Believe In

Emile M. Cioran

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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.

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Under Each Formula Lies A Corpse.

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

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.

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

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

History Proves Nothing Because It Contains Everything.

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

No One Can Do Without Some Semblance Of Immortality, And Even Less Will They Deny Themselves The Right To Seek It Out In The Form Of This Or That Reputation, Starting With The Literary... Since Death Has Come To Be Accepted By All As The Absolute End, Everyone Writes.

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

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

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.

Criticism Is A Misconception: We Must Read Not To Understand Others But To Understand Ourselves.

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

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

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?

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

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

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

Tears Do Not Burn Except In Solitude.

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

Each Of Us Is Born With A Share Of Purity, Predestined To Be Corrupted By Our Commerce With Mankind, By That Sin Against Solitude.

Skepticism Is The Elegance Of Anxiety.

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.

There Is No Other World. Nor Even This One. What, Then, Is There? The Inner Smile Provoked In Us By The Patent Nonexistence Of Both.

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.

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

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.

All The Concessions We Make To Eros Are Holes In Our Desire For The Absolute.

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

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

Each Time I Fail To Think About Death, I Have The Impression Of Cheating, Of Deceiving Someone In Me.

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

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

Humanity Adores Only Those Who Cause It To Perish.

We Would Not Be Interested In Human Beings If We Did Not Have The Hope Of Someday Meeting Someone Worse Off Than Ourselves.

Meeting Someone

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

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.

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.

Ideas Come As You Walk, Nietzsche Said. Walking Dissipates Thoughts, Shankara Taught.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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?

Woes And Wonders Of Power, That Tonic Hell, Synthesis Of Poison And Panacea.

He Who Has Never Envied The Vegetable Has Missed The Human Drama.

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

What Does The Future, That Half Of Time, Matter To The Man Who Is Infatuated With Eternity?

The Source Of Our Actions Resides In An Unconscious Propensity To Regard Ourselves As The Center, The Cause, And The Conclusion Of Time. Our Reflexes And Our Pride Transform Into A Planet The Parcel Of Flesh And Consciousness We Are.

To Hope Is To Contradict The Future.

Philosophy: Impersonal Anxiety; Refuge Among Anemic Ideas.

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.

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

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

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

Chaos In The World

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

A Civilization Is Destroyed Only When Its Gods Are Destroyed.

Old Age, After All, Is Merely The Punishment For Having Lived.

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

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

One Doesn't Live In A Country, One Lives In A Language.

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

Futility Of Life

The Fear Of Your Own Solitude, Of Its Vast Surface And Its Infinity… Remorse Is The Voice Of Solitude. And What Does This Whispering Voice Say? Everything In Us That Is Not Human Anymore.

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

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

We Derive Our Vitality From Our Store Of Madness.

Democracy: A Festival Of Mediocrity.

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.

We Cannot Be Normal And Alive At The Same Time.

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

My Mission Is To See Things As They Are. Exactly Contrary Of A Mission.

Positive Atheism

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.

Death Makes No Sense Except To People Who Have Passionately Loved Life. How Can One Die Without Having Something To Part From? Detachment Is A Negation Of Both Life And Death. Whoever Has Overcome His Fear Of Death Has Also Triumphed Over Life. For Life Is Nothing But Another Word For This Fear.

Only Superficial Minds Approach An Idea With Delicacy.

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.

I Have Always Lived With The Awareness Of The Impossibility Of Living. And What Has Made Existence Endurable To Me Is My Curiosity As To How I Would Get From One Minute, One Day, One Year To The Next.

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

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

To Act Is To Anchor In The Imminent Future.

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

We Rightly Scorn Those Who Have No Made Use Of Their Defects, Who Have Not Exploited Their Deficiencies, And Have Not Been Enriched By Their Losses, As We Despise Any Man Who Does Not Suffer At Being A Man Or Simply At Being. Hence No Graver Insult Can Be Inflicted Than To Call Someone 'happy', No Greater Flattery Than To Grant Him A 'vein Of Melancholy'... This Is Because Gaiety Is Link To No Important Action And Because, Except For The Mad, No One Laughs When He Is Alone.

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

Existing Is Plagiarism.

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

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.

Life Is Merely A Fracas On An Unmapped Terrain, And The Universe A Geometry Stricken With Epilepsy.

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

Best Laid Plans

Skepticism Is The Sadism Of Embittered Souls.

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

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

We Change Ideas Like Neckties.

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

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

Espousing The Melancholy Of Ancient Symbols, I Would Have Freed Myself.

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

To Have Committed Every Crime But That Of Being A Father.

I Do Not Want To See Bp Nickel And Diming These Businesses That Are Having A Tough Time.

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

The Limit Of Every Pain Is An Even Greater Pain.

Consciousness Is Nature's Nightmare.

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

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

I Have No Nationality - The Best Possible Status For An Intellectual.

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

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.

What Strangely Enchanted Tunes Gush Forth During Those Sleepless Nights!

There Was A Time When Time Did Not Yet Exist.

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.

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.

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.

Every Form Of Talent Involves A Certain Shameless-ness.

How Important Can It Be That I Suffer And Think? My Presence In This World Will Disturb A Few Tranquil Lives And Will Unsettle The Unconscious And Pleasant Naiveté Of Others. Although I Feel That My Tragedy Is The Greatest In History - Greater Than The Fall Of Empires - I Am Nevertheless Aware Of My Total Insignificance. I Am Absolutely Persuaded That I Am Nothing In This Universe; Yet I Feel That Mine Is The Only Real Existence.

The More We Try To Rest Ourselves From Our Egos, The Deeper We Sink Into It.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

An Existence Transfigured By Failure.

A Book Is A Suicide Postponed.

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

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

Try To Be Free: You Will Die Of Hunger.

Normal People Have Nothing To Forget.

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

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

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

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

To Want Fame Is To Prefer Dying Scorned Than Forgotten.

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

Utopia Is A Mixture Of Childish Rationalism And Secularized Angelism.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Nothing Sweeter Than To Drag Oneself Along Behind Events; And Nothing More Reasonable. But Without A Strong Dose Of Madness, No Initiative, No Enterprise, No Gesture. Reason: The Rust Of Our Vitality. It Is The Madman In Us Who Forces Us To Adventure; Once He Abandons Us, We Are Lost; Everything Depends On Him, Even Our Vegetative Life; It Is He Who Invites Us, Who Obliges Us To Breathe, And It Is Also He Who Forces Our Blood To Venture Through Our Veins. Once He Withdraws, We Are Alone Indeed! We Cannot Be Normal And Alive At The Same Time.

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

The Desire To Die Was My One And Only Concern; To It I Have Sacrificed Everything, Even Death.

My One And Only

If You're Unlucky Enough Not To Have Alcoholic Parents, It Takes You A Whole Lifetime Of Intoxication To Overcome The Dead Weight Of Their Virtues.

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.

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

Discretion Is Deadly To Genius; Ruinous To Talent.

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.

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

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

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

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

A Civilization Begins To Decline The Moment Life Becomes Its Sole Obsession.

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

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.

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

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.

One Hardly Saves A World Without Ruling It.

We Inhabit A Language Rather Than A Country.

We Are Born To Exist, Not To Know, To Be, Not To Assert Ourselves.

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.

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

Meaning Of Life

Tolerance Cannot Seduce The Young.

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

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

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

Basis Of Society: Anonymous Sweat.

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

The Task Of The Solitary Man Is To Be Even More Solitary.

Life Creates Itself In Delirium And Is Undone In Ennui.

Delirium Tremens

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.

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.

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

We Have Convictions Only If We Have Studied Nothing Thoroughly.

Consciousness Is Much More Than The Thorn, It Is The Dagger In The Flesh.

Beware Of Thinkers Whose Minds Function Only When They Are Fueled By A Quotation.

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

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

If A Man Has Not, By The Time He Is Thirty, Yielded To The Fascination Of Every Form Of Extremism—i Don't Know Whether He Is To Be Admired Or Scorned, Regarded As A Saint Or A Corpse.

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.

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

Music Is The Refuge Of Souls Ulcerated By Happiness.

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

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

To Live... In Any Sense Of The Word... Is To Reject Others; To Accept Them, One Must Renounce, Do Oneself Violence.

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.

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

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.

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

One Does Not Inhabit A Country; One Inhabits A Language. That Is Our Country, Our Fatherland - And No Other.

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

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

The Aphorism Is Cultivated Only By Those Who Have Known Fear In The Midst Of Words, That Fear Of Collapsing With All The Words.

We Interest Others By The Misfortune We Spread Around Us.

Melancholy: An Appetite No Misery Satisfies.

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

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