A few words from the Romanian essayist Emil Cioran and 21 photos from Tamas Urban.

“As far as I’m concerned, I resign from humanity.”

“I feel completely detached from any country, any group.

I am a metaphysically displaced person.”

“It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say ‘we’ with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke ‘others’ and regard himself as their interpreter – for me to consider him my enemy.”

“To accomplish nothing and die of the strain.”

“If a man has not, by the time he is thirty, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism—I don’t know whether he is to be admired or scorned, regarded as a saint or a corpse.”

“It is a mistake to think of the expatriate as someone who abdicates, who withdraws and humbles himself, resigned to his miseries, his outcast state. On a closer look, he turns out to be ambitious, aggressive in his disappointments, his very acrimony qualified by his belligerence. The more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and illusions become. I even discern some relation between misfortune and megalomania. The man who has lost everything preserves as a last resort the hope of glory, or of literary scandal.”

“A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation’s paradise and its tomb.”

“Truths begin by a conflict with the police – and ends by calling them in.”

All photos courtesy of the generous FORTEPAN.

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