What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.

My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

Unlike other sicknesses, life is always fatal. It doesn't tolerate therapies. It would be like stopping the holes that we have in our bodies, believing them wounds. We would die of strangulation the moment we were treated.

The common prejudice that love is as common as ‘romance’ may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which ennoscripts them to mistake it for a universal one.

Your passion decomposes you scrupulously.

I see nothing but a world of ruins, where a kind of front line is possible in the catacombs

“I hear you.” Not “You’re right.” I don’t even need to agree. Just acknowledge. I hear you. I hear your frustration. I get it.

Maybe Nostalgia is the only home you get

What shall we tell the blind woman in Rilke’s poem who lamented that ‘I can no longer live with the sky upon me’? Would it comfort her if we told her we can no longer live with the earth underneath our feet?

— Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints.

We have entertainment in order not to die from truth.

We’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; what a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.

Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours

The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.

Beauty is made up of an eternal, invariable element, whose quantity it is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be, if you like, whether severally or all at once, the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions.

No beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.

This year felt like being awake during surgery

And the silly people sing: "Don't Look Back in Anger"
And the morons sing and sway: "Don't Look Back in Anger"

I can assure you I will look back in anger 'till the day I die.

New Year’s Eve always terrifies me, life knows nothing of years. Now the horns have stopped and the firecrackers and the thunder… it’s all over in five minutes… all I hear is the rain on the palm leaves, and I think, I will never understand men, but I have lived it through.