E.M. Cioran

We obtain almost everything, except what we secretly crave.

To renounce is no easy thing, yet nothing but striving for it affords some peace.

Man proceeds from one chaos to the next.

Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.

The author, no less than the work, must dissimulate his identity, yield everything of himself except the essential, persevere in his enchantment and his solitude, a sovereign subservient to his words, their dazzled slave.

Were the universe to vanish, nothing would be lost, since language would immediately take its place.

Devouring biographies one after the next to be convinced of the futility of any undertaking, of any destiny

A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice all the more serious in that the intention was to do us a favor.

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

To recognize in oneself all the vile instincts of which one is ashamed. . . . If they are so energetic in someone who strives to be rid of them, how much more virulent must they be in those who, lacking a minimum of lucidity, will never manage to be on their guard, and still less to loathe themselves!