We have to entertain the possibility that there is no reason for something existing; or that the split between subject and object is only our name for something equally accidental we call knowledge; or, an even more difficult thought, that while there may be some order to the self and the cosmos, to the microcosm and macrocosm, it is an order that is absolutely indifferent to our existence, and of which we can have only a negative awareness.

Just when things look darkest, they go black.

We must display our unhappiness and from time to time be heard to sigh, be seen to be impatient: for if we let others see how happy and secure in ourselves we are in spite of suffering and deprivation, how malicious and envious we would make them! — We have to take care not to corrupt our fellow men; moreover, they would in the instance referred to impose upon us a heavy impost, and our public suffering is in any event also our private advantage.

The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.

Change has its enemies.

A tragedy when a mature mind and a romantic heart are in the same body.

There will always be rocks in the road ahead of us. They will be stumbling blocks or stepping stones; it all depends on how you use them.

“The state of being alone was my religion. You have become the center of my life, the goddess of one who does not believe in anything, the greatest happiness and unhappiness ever encountered.”

Emil Cioran in a letter to Friedgard Thoma.

I want to rethink 'surrender' as an active verb.

I learned that just beneath the surface there’s another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn’t find the proof. It was just a feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force - a wild pain and decay - also accompanies everything.

Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.

Sartre’s...concept of hell in his 1944 play No Exit is tinglingly prophetic of our current predicament. The play is about three freshly dead strangers who have just arrived in a windowless room in hell. One of the first things they all notice about hell is the absence of mirrors...and they become each other’s looking-glasses. The play’s conception of damnation, then, is a life in which your self-image is forged entirely in public. Your “I” only exists because someone says “You.” Garcin understands that “there’s no need for red-hot pokers” in this place, because both the scrutiny of his roommates and his terrible reliance on them is the torture. “Hell is — other people!”

No Exit [is] a predictive text, a warning to the coming digital generations about living under the unblinking gaze of others. Sartre’s famous line is a recognition that the self–other balance can never be adequately struck as long as the "others" are constantly "watching." Balance depends on our ability to retreat into a truly private place, released from the demands and appellations of our devices.

Disjunction from the world through suffering leads to excessive interiorization and, paradoxically, to such a high level of consciousness that the world, with all its splendors and glooms, becomes exterior and transcendent. Thus deeply sundered from the world, so irredeemably lonely, how can we forget anything? We want to forget only what made us suffer. However, through some cruel and paradoxical twist, memories vanish when we want to remember but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

One is dead in one’s lifetime itself; multiple deaths accompany us, ghosts that are not necessarily hostile, and yet others, not dead enough, not dead long enough to make a corpse. At any rate, we have all already been dead before living, and we came out of it alive. We were dead before and we shall be dead again after. Death and life can reverse themselves from this standpoint. And this implies another presence of death to life, because it – not simply an indeterminate nothingness, but a determinate, personal death – was there before and it does not cease to exist and to make itself felt with birth. This connects up with the genetic process of apoptosis, in which the two opposing processes of life and death begin at the same time. In which death is not the gradual exhaustion of life: they are autonomous processes – complicit in a way, parallel and indissociable.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one’s idea for thirty-five years; there’s something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever…