Roman Pacheco > Roman's Quotes

“An existence transfigured by failure.”
― E.M. Cioran

“June, you have killed my sincerity too. I will never again know who I am, what I am, what I love, what I want. Your beauty has drowned me, the core of me. You carry away with you a part of me reflected in you. When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. You are the woman I want to be. I see in you that part of me which is you. I feel compassion for your childish pride, for your trembling unsureness, your dramatization of events, your enhancing of the loves given to you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madness.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“If I maintain my silence about my secret it is my prisoner...if I let it slip from my tongue, I am ITS prisoner.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that existence has no
real value in itself; for what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness of life? If life—the craving for which is the very essence of our being—were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism: The Essays

“God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“What do you do from morning to night?"

"I endure myself.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don’t know where that elsewhere is.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, “What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act.” And they do calm down.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“To have committed every crime but that of being a father.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression.
I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on.

Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do. One so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“I am for the most part so convinced that everything is lacking in basis, consequence, justification, that if someone dared to contradict me, even the man I most admire, he would seem to me a charlatan or a fool.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass—which is better than trying to fill them.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“For a long time—always, in fact—I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn’t able to deal with it; for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“I long to be free—desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“To be objective is to treat others as you treat an object, a corpse—to behave with them like an undertaker.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“The real, the unique misfortune: to see the light of day. A disaster which dates back to aggressiveness, to the seed of expansion and rage within origins, to the tendency to the worst which first shook them up.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“My vision of the future is so exact that if I had children, I should strangle them here and now.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“And what I really intended to say in the end remains unsaid.”
― Franz Kafka