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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.

-Emile M. Cioran

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To Get Up In

Emile M. Cioran

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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.

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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.

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?

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

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.

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

Every Thought Derives From A Thwarted Sensation.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Jealousy - That Jumble Of Secret Worship And Ostensible Aversion.

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

Word - That Invisible Dagger.

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

Try To Be Free: You Will Die Of Hunger.

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.

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

Philosophy: Impersonal Anxiety; Refuge Among Anemic Ideas.

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

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.

Tears Do Not Burn Except In Solitude.

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

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.

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.

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

Nothing Is So Wearing As The Possession Or Abuse Of Liberty.

When Every Man Has Realized That His Birth Is A Defeat, Existence, Endurable At Last, Will Seem Like The Day After A Surrender, Like The Relief And The Repose Of The Conquered.

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

Best Laid Plans

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

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

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

I Was Walking Late One Night Along A Tree-lined Path; A Chestnut Fell At My Feet. The Noise It Made As It Burst, The Resonance It Provoked In Me, And An Upheaval Out Of All Proportion To This Insignificant Event Thrust Me Into Miracle, Into The Rapture Of The Definitive, As If There Were No More Questions-only Answers. I Was Drunk On A Thousand Unexpected Discoveries, None Of Which I Could Make Use Of. ... This Is How I Nearly Reached The Supreme. But Instead I Went On With My Walk.

We Derive Our Vitality From Our Store Of Madness.

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

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

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

What I Know At Sixty, I Knew As Well At Twenty. Forty Years Of A Long, Superfluous, Labor Of Verification.

We Are Afraid Of The Enormity Of The Possible.

Melancholy: An Appetite No Misery Satisfies.

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

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.

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

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

Only Superficial Minds Approach An Idea With Delicacy.

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

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.

For A Long Time—always, In Fact—i Have Known That Life Here On Earth Is Not What I Needed And That I Wasn’t Able To Deal With It; For This Reason And For This Reason Alone, I Have Acquired A Touch Of Spiritual Pride, So That My Existence Seems To Me The Degradation And The Erosion Of A Psalm.

Write Books Only If You Are Going To Say In Them The Things You Would Never Dare Confide To Anyone.

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

Utopia Is A Mixture Of Childish Rationalism And Secularized Angelism.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 Golden Rule: To Leave An Incomplete Image Of Oneself.

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

Reality Is A Creation Of Our Excesses.

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

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

What Music Appeals To In Us It Is Difficult To Know; What We Do Know Is That Music Reaches A Zone So Deep That Madness Itself Cannot Penetrate There.

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

Pursued By Our Origins... We All Are.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

If There Is Anyone Who Owes Everything To Bach, It Is Certainly God.

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

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

We Have Convictions Only If We Have Studied Nothing Thoroughly.

To Accomplish Nothing And Die Of The Strain

Accomplish Nothing

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.

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

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.

Thinking Should Be Like Musical Meditation. Has Any Philosopher Pursued A Thought To Its Limits The Way Bach Or Beethoven Develop And Exhaust A Musical Theme? Even After Having Read The Most Profound Thinkers, One Still Feels The Need To Begin Anew. Only Music Gives Definitive Answers.

Our First Intuitions Are The True Ones.

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.

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.

Doubt Works Deep Within You Like A Disease Or, Even More Effectively, Like A Faith.

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

We Interest Others By The Misfortune We Spread Around Us.

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

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

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

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

Chaos In The World

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

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

Shame On The Man Who Goes To His Grave Escorted By The Miserable Hopes That Have Kept Him Alive.

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.

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.

There Is No Limit To Suffering.

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

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

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

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."

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.

Only One Thing Matters: Learning To Be The Loser.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Every Form Of Talent Involves A Certain Shameless-ness.

Great Persecutors Are Recruited Among Martyrs Whose Heads Haven't Been Cut Off.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Positive Atheism

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.

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.

An Existence Transfigured By Failure.

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

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.

No One Can Enjoy Freedom Without Trembling.

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.

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

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

My One And Only

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

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

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.

Lucidity's Task: To Attain A Correct Despair, An Olympian Ferocity.

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?

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

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

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.

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

Basis Of Society: Anonymous Sweat.

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

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

We Inhabit A Language Rather Than A Country.

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.

To Hope Is To Contradict The Future.

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.

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.

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

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

If You Lack The Power To Demoralize Yourself Along With The Age, To Go As Low And As Far, Do Not Complain Of Being Misunderstood By It.

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.

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

Between Ennui And Ecstasy Unwinds Our Whole Experience Of Time.

Normal People Have Nothing To Forget.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

We Change Ideas Like Neckties.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Our Place Is Somewhere Between Being And Nonbeing - Between Two Fictions.

What Strangely Enchanted Tunes Gush Forth During Those Sleepless Nights!

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Discretion Is Deadly To Genius; Ruinous To Talent.

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

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

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

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

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

As Far As I Am Concerned, I Resign From Humanity. I No Longer Want To Be, Nor Can Still Be, A Man. What Should I Do? Work For A Social And Political System, Make A Girl Miserable? Hunt For Weaknesses In Philosophical Systems, Fight For Moral And Esthetic Ideals? It’s All Too Little. I Renounce My Humanity Even Though I May Find Myself Alone. But Am I Not Already Alone In This World From Which I No Longer Expect Anything?

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

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

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

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.

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