One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.
Emil Cioran
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
The Universal view melts things into a blur.
Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.
Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
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.
Everything is pathology, except for indifference.
We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.
For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
We inhabit a language rather than a country.
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.
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.
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
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.
Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.
Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.
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.
I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.
Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
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.
I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
