Every thinker, at the start of his career, opts in spite of himself for dialectic or for weeping willows.

Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.

If Nietzsche, Proust, Baudelaire, or Rimbaud survive the fluctuations of fashions, they owe it to the disinterestedness of their cruelty. What makes a work last, what keeps it from dating, is its ferocity. A gratuitous assertion? Consider the prestige of the Gospels, that aggressive book, a venomous text if ever there was one.

If melancholy has vouchsafed me such a dearth of ideas, that’s because I loved it too much to let my mind deplete it.

Every aspect of thought has its moment, its frivolity: in our time, the notion of Nothingness … How dated seem Matter, Energy, Spirit! Fortunately the lexicon is rich: each generation can delve there and come up with a word as important as the others — uselessly defunct.

Any and all water is the color of drowning.

You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.

Only optimists commit suicide, the optimists who can no longer be … optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?

We always love … despite; and that “despite” covers an infinity.

Emil Cioran, All Gall is Divided (via heteroglossia)