... any revolution prevails only if it pits itself agains...

... any revolution prevails only if it pits itself against an unreal order. The same is true of any advent, any historical turning point. The Goths did not conquer Rome, they conquered a corpse. The Barbarians' only merit was to have had a nose ...

Despite everything, it would be sweet to know that twilight success in which we might escape the succession of generations and the parade of tomorrows, and when, on the ruins of historical time, existence, at last identical with itself, will again become what it was before turning into history.

As long as history follows a more or less normal course, every event appears as a whim, a faux pas of Time; once it changes cadence, the slightest incident assumes the scope of a sign.

If we insist that history must have a meaning let us seek it in the curse that weighs upon it, and nowhere else.

After so many defeats and conquests, man is beginning to put himself out of date. He still deserves some interest only insofar as he is tracked and cornered, sinking ever deeper. If he continues, it is because he hasn't the strength to capitulate, to suspend his desertion forward (the very definition of history).

What ruins us, no, what has ruined us, is the thirst for a destiny, for any destiny whatever ...

The charm of a life without reflexion, of existence as such being forbidden to us, we cannot bear that others should delight in it. Deserters of innocence, we turn against whoever still resides within it, against all the beings that, indifferent to our adventure, loll in their blessed torpor. And the gods - have we not turned against them as well, outraged to see that they were conscious without suffering from the fact, while for us consciousness and shipwreck are one and the same thing.

No more schools; on the other hand, courses in oblivion and unlearning to celebrate the virtues of inattention and the delights of amnesisa.

What cannot be translated into mystical language does not deserve to be experienced.

It is my elocutionary defects, my stammerings, my jerky delivery, my art of mumbling - it is my voice, my transeuropean r's, that have impelled me by reaction to take some care with what I write and to make myself more or less worthy of an idiom I mistreat each time I open my mouth.

One does not write because one has something to say but because one wants to say something.

Existing is plagiarism.

True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.

To exist is a colossal phenomenon - which has no meaning. This is how I should define the stupefaction in which I live day after day.

We must censure the later Nietzsche for a panting excess in the writing, the absence of rests.

At the Zoo. - All these creatures have a decent bearing, except the monkeys. One feels that man is not far off.

Musical Offering, Art of the Fugue, Goldberg Variations: I love in music, as in philosophy and everything, what pains by insistence, by recurrence, by that interminable return which reaches the ultimate depths of being and provokes there a barely endurable delectation.

To send someone a book is to commit a burglary - a case of breaking and entering. It is to trample down his solitude, what he holds most sacred, for it is to oblige him to desist from himself in order to think about your thoughts.

To be is to be cornered.

E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered