Emil Cioran

“Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.”

“A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.”

“A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.”

“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.”

“Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.”

“The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.”

“What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?”

“We inhabit a language rather than a country.”

“If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.”

“What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?”

“To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.”

“Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.”

“Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.”

“Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.”

“A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.”

“Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.”

“The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.”

“I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.”

“Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.”

“Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.”