E.M. Cioran

but to acquire a taste and to achieve mastery are two very different things.

We might also detect, in his pursuit of the unapproachable, a touch of masochism: to worship, in order to torment oneself, what one will never achieve; to punish oneself for being, in the realm of Knowledge", a mere amateur.

The writer must guard against reflecting excessively upon language, must avoid making it the substance of his obsessions, must never forget that the important works have been created despite language.

Consciousness intervenes in our actions only to frustrate their execution; consciousness is a perpetual interrogation of life, it is perhaps the ruin of life.

IT IS NEVER ideas we should speak of, only sensations and visions — for ideas do not proceed from our entrails; ideas are never truly ours.

There exists, I grant you, a clinical depression, upon which certain remedies occasionally have an effect; but there exists another kind, a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself.

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.