E.M. Cioran

To combat a “monster” is necessarily to possess some mysterious affinities with him, and also to borrow from him certain character traits.

“I fall into an idea as from a precipice,” complained a sick man; de Maistre could have said as much, though with this difference, that he longed to fall there, that he burned to be engulfed, and that like certain aggressive thinkers, enraged thinkers, he was impatient to take us down with him

It is not the violent evils that mark us but the secret, insistent tolerable ones belonging to our daily round and undermining us as conscientiously as Time itself.