Consider love: is there a nobler outpouring, a rapture less suspect? Its shudders rival music, compete with the tears of solitude and of ecstasy: sublime...but a sublimity inseperable from the urinary tract: transports bordering upon excretion, a heaven of the glands, sudden sancitity of the orifices. It takes no more than a moment of attention for this intoxication, shaken, to cast you back into the ordures of physiology or a moment of fatigue to recognize that so much ardor produces only a variety of mucous.
Emile M. CioranTo write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall?
Emile M. CioranThe literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty-the sideshow of second thoughts-is his rule; he offers himself.
Emile M. CioranThe reaction against your own thought in itself lends life to thought. How this reaction is born is hard to describe, because it identifies with the very rare intellectual tragedies. The tension, the degree and level of intensity of a thought proceeds from its internal antinomies, which in turn are derived from the unsolvable contradictions of a soul. Thought cannot solve the contradictions of the soul. As far as linear thinking is concerned, thoughts mirror themselves in other thoughts, instead of mirroring a destiny.
Emile M. Cioran