E.M. Cioran

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and our memory.

No one could survive the instantaneous comprehension of universal grief, each heart being stirred only for a certain quantity of sufferings

The result is fanaticism—fundamental defect which gives man the craving for effectiveness, for prophecy, for terror—a lyrical leprosy by which he contaminates souls, subdues them, crushes or exalts them. . . . Only the skeptics (or idlers or aesthetes) escape, because they propose nothing, because they—humanity’s true benefactors—undermine fanaticism’s purposes, analyze its frenzy

he wants you to share his hysteria, his fullness, he wants to impose it on you, and thereby to disfigure you. A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth, where our mania for salvation makes life unbreathable.

Whereas 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. No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited among the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exas

“If a man loves nothing, he will be invulnerable” (Chuang Tse)

We can never ponder enough Kirilov’s description of Stavrogin: “When he believes, he doesn’t believe he believes; and when he doesn’t believe, he doesn’t believe he doesn’t believe.”

The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their lives a meaning.

However grave its consequences may have been, the rejection of Christianity remains the Jews’ finest exploit, a no which does them honor.

Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet, Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise.