The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

Cioran links the aphoristic form to a writer’s crisis of language: the sense that words proliferate, lose necessity, and threaten to bury thought rather than express it. The aphorism, in this view, is not a decorative preference but a survival strategy—compression as a defense against verbosity, rhetoric, and the self-deception that can arise from fluent discourse. To “know fear in the midst of words” is to experience language as unstable and exhausting, where extended argument risks collapse into emptiness. The aphorism becomes an act of discipline and honesty: a refusal to let language run on when conviction, clarity, or inner urgency cannot sustain it.