Stephen Rowland

“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

“Whereas all beings have their place in nature, man remains a metaphysically straying creature, lost in Life, a stranger to the Creation.”
― Emil M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“If one were at every moment conscious of what one knew - if, for example, the sentiment of foundationlessness were both continual and intense - one would kill oneself or allow oneself to slip into imbecility. One exits thanks to the moments when one forgets certain truths.”
― Emil Cioran

“And this nothing, this everything, cannot give life a meaning, but it nonetheless makes life persevere in what it is: a state of non-suicide.”
― Emil M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay