Emil Cioran on Love

"What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots."

"When you love someone, you hope — the more closely to be attached — that a catastrophe will strike your beloved."

"Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates."

"The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world."

"The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous."

"A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy."

"In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart. Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety."

"His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse."

"Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything."

"Love, a tacit agreement between two unhappy parties to overestimate each other."

"All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute."

"To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement."

"Love's great originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery."

"We always love . . . despite; and that "despite" covers an infinity."

"To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze."

"What is not heartrending is superfluous, at least in music."

"Love of the absolute engenders a predilection for self-destruction. Hence the passion for monasteries and brothels. Cells and women, in both cases. Weariness with life fares well in the shadow of whores and saintly women."

"Thought is as much a lie as love or faith."

"Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun."

"For a long while I have lived with the notion that I was the most normal being that ever existed. This notion gave me the taste, even the passion for being unproductive: what was the use of being prized in a world inhabited by madmen, a world mired in mania and stupidity? For whom was one to bother, and to what end? It remains to be seen if I have quite freed myself from this certitude, salvation in the absolute, ruin in the immediate."