Stephen Rowland

“In the gamut of creatures, only man inspires a sustained disgust.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.”
― Emil M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“It was enough for one Hindu prince to see a cripple, an old old man, and a corpse to understand everything; we see them and understand nothing, for nothing changes in our life. We cannot renounce anything; yet the evidences of vanity are in our reach. Invalids of hope, we are still waiting; and life is only the hypostatization of waiting. We wait for everything – even Nothingness – rather than be reduced to an eternal suspension, to a condition of neutral divinity, of a corpse. Thus the heart, which has made the Irreparable into an axiom, still hopes for surprises from it. Humanity lives in love with the events which deny it…”
― Emil M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“When I despise myself, I tell myself, in order to shore up my confidence, that after all, I have managed to maintain myself in being or in a semblance of being, with a perception of things that very few could have endured.”
― Emil Cioran