A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
— Emil Cioran
A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?
When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.
Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.
We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
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.
Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
The Universal view melts things into a blur.
Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.
A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.
For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.
Everything is pathology, except for indifference.
So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.
Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
