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The Trouble With Being Born – Emil Cioran

As a general rule, men expect disappointment: they know they must not be impatient, that it will come sooner or later, that it will hold off long enough for them to proceed with their undertakings of the moment. The disabused man is different: for him, disappointment occurs at the same time as the deed; he has no need to await it, it is present. By freeing himself from succession, he has devoured the possible and rendered the future superfluous. “I cannot meet you in your future,” he says to the others. “We do not have a single moment in common.” Because for him the whole of the future is already here.
When we perceive the end in the beginning, we move faster than time. Illumination, that lightning disappointment, affords a certitude which transforms disillusion into deliverance.

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True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.

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What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.

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Days of miraculous sterility. Instead of rejoicing over them, proclaiming victory, transforming this drought into a celebration, seeing it as an illustration of my fulfillment, my maturity, in short my detachment, I let myself be invaded by spite and resentment: so tenacious is the old Adam in us, the bustling canaille, unfit for self-effacement.

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While we are performing an action, we have a goal; performed, the action has no more reality for us than the goal we were seeking. Nothing of much consequence here—no more than a game. But some of us are conscious of this game in the course of the action: we experience the conclusion in the premises, the achieved in the virtual—we undermine “seriousness” by the very fact that we exist.
The vision of non-reality, of universal default, is the product of an everyday sensation and a sudden frisson. Everything is a game—without such a revelation, the sensation we haul through our usual lives would not have that characteristic stamp our metaphysical experiences require to be distinguished from their imitations, our discomforts. For every discomfort is only an abortive metaphysical experience.

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I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.

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As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.

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Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what’s the use of writing in order to say exactly waht we had to say?

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Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.

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Health is certainly a good thing; but those who possess it have been denied the opportunity of realizing it, for self-conscious health is either compromised or about to be. Since no one delights in his absence of infirmities, we may speak without exaggeration of a just punishment of the healthy.

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“All is suffering”—modernized, the Buddhist expression runs: “All is nightmare.”
Thereby, nirvana, whose mission now is to end a much more widespread torment, is no longer a recourse reserved to the few but becomes as universal as nightmare itself.

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We tell our troubles to someone only to make him suffer, to make him assume them for himself. If we wanted to win him over, we would admit none but abstract worries, the only kind those who love us are eager to hear.

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The surest way of not being deceived is to undermine one certainty after the next. Yet the fact remains that everything that matters was accomplished outside doubt.

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Our thoughts, in the pay of our panic, are oriented toward the future, follow the trail of all fear, open out onto death. And we invert their course, we send them backward when we direct them toward birth and force them to linger upon it. Thereby they lose even that vigor, that unappeasable tension which underlies the horror of death and which is useful to our thoughts if they would grow, develop, gather force. Hence we see why, by taking a contrary trajectory, they lack spirit and are so weary, when at last they come up against their initial frontier, that they no longer have the energy to look beyond, toward the “never-born.”

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Though we may prefer ourselves to the universe, we nonetheless loathe ourselves much more than we suspect. If the wise man is so rare a phenomenon, it is because he seems unshaken by the aversion which, like all beings, he must feel for himself.

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This is how we recognize the man who has tendencies toward an inner quest: he will set failure above any success, he will even seek it out, unconsciously of course. This is because failure, always essential, reveals us to ourselves, permits us to see ourselves as God sees us, whereas success distances us from what is most inward in ourselves and indeed in everything.

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In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left—ignorant how to react—with a foolish grin.

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[…] After midnight begins the intoxication of pernicious truths.

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[…] the future has always been hideous, man being able to remedy his evils only by aggravating them, so that in each epoch existence is much more tolerable before the solution is found to the difficulties of the moment.

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X insults me. I am about to hit him. Thinking it over, I refrain.
Who am I? which is my real self: the self of the retort or that of the refraining? My first reaction is always energetic; the second one, flabby. What is known as “wisdom” is ultimately only a perpetual “thinking it over,” i.e., non-action as first impulse.

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During the long nights in the caves, how many Hamlets must have murmured their endless monologues—for it is likely that the apogee of metaphysical torment is to be located well before that universal insipidity which followed the advent of Philosophy.

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It is our discomforts which provoke, which create consciousness; their task accomplished, they weaken and disappear one after the other. Consciousness however remains and survives them, without recalling what it owes to them, without even ever having known. Hence it continually proclaims its autonomy, its sovereignty, even when it loathes itself and would do away with itself.

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To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. […]

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It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should avoid simulacra and even “realities;” you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a “solitary elephant.”

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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.

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Violent men are generally sickly, “broken-down.” They live in perpetual combustion, at the expense of their bodies, exactly like ascetics, who in the discipline of quietude erode and exhaust themselves, quite as much as the furious.

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Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

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The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don’t know what that elsewhere is.

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“For [Elohim] doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened…”
No sooner are they open than the drama begins. To look without understanding—that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much…

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I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.

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Anything good we can have comes from our indolence, from our incapability of taking action, executing our projects and plans. It is the impossibility or the refusal of self-realization which sustains our “virtues,” and it is the will to do our utmost that carries us to excesses, to disorders.

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Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.

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Ama nesari, says the Imitation of Christ. Love to be unknown. We are happy with ourselves and with the world only when we conform to this precept.

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The intrinsic value of a book does not depend on the importance of its subject (else the theologians would prevail, and mightily), but on the manner of approaching the accidental and the insignificant, of mastering the infinitesimal. The essential has never required the least talent.

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The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity…

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Negation never proceeds from reasoning but from something much more obscure and old. Arguments come afterward, to justify and sustain it. Every no rises out of the blood.

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Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on.
Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

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The merest atmospheric variation jeopardizes my plans, not to speak of my convictions. This kind of dependency—the most humiliating kind—unfailingly lays me low, even as it dissipates what few illusions remain as to my possibilities of being free and as to freedom itself. What is the use of swaggering if you are at the mercy of Wet and Dry? One craves a less lamentable bondage, and gods of another kidney.

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When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.

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Each opinion, each view is necessarily partial, truncated, inadequate. In philosophy and in anything, originality comes down to incomplete definitions.

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If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?

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More than once, I have managed to leave my room, for if I had stayed there I could not be sure of being able to resist some sudden resolution. The street is more reassuring, you think less about yourself there, there everything weakens and wilts, beginning with your own confusion.

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When we are young, we take a certain pleasure in our infirmities. They seem so new, so rich! With age, they no longer surprise us, we know them too well. Now, without anything unexpected in them, they do not deserve to be endured.

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“What do you do from morning to night?” “I endure myself.”

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Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.

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We do not envy those who have the capacity to pray, whereas we are filled with envy of the possessors of goods, of those who know wealth and fame. Strange that we resign ourselves to someone’s salvation and not to what fugitive advantages he may enjoy.

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To be objective is to treat others as you treat an object, a corpse—to behave with them like an undertaker.

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To walk along a stream, to pass, to flow with the water, without effort, without haste, while death continues in us its ruminations, its uninterrupted soliloquy…

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Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.

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A work exists only if it is elaborated in the darkness with attention, with all the care of the murderer plotting his crime. In both cases, what counts is the will to strike.

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Self-knowledge—the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?

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The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character—precisely that and nothing but.

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“What are you waiting for in order to give up?”—Each sickness sends us a summons disguised as a question. We play deaf, even as we realize that the game is played out and that next time we must have the courage, at last, to capitulate.

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The older I grow, the less I react to frenzy, delirium. My taste, among thinkers, now goes only to extinct volcanoes.

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If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.

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This craving to revise our enthusiasms, to change idols, to pray elsewhere…

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To stretch out in a field, to smell the earth and tell yourself it is the end as well as the hope of our dejections, that it would be futile to search for anything better to fest on, to dissolve into…

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When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment’s thought to the “meaning” of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not in abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.

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In the Orient, the oddest, the most idiosyncratic Western thinkers would never have been taken seriously, on account of their contradictions. This is precisely why we are interested in them. We prefer not a mind but the reversals, the biography of a mind, the incompatibilities and aberrations to be found there, in short those thinkers who, unable to conform to the rest of humanity and still less to themselves, cheat as much by whim as by fatality. Their distinctive sign? A touch of fakery in the tragic, a hint of dalliance even in the irremediable.

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If, in her Foundations, Teresa of Avila lingers over the subject of melancholia, it is because she recognizes it as incurable. Physicians, she says, cannot deal with it, and the mother superior of a convent, faced with such sufferers, has but one recourse: to inspire them with the dread of authority, to threaten them, to frighten them. The saint’s method remains the best: only kicks, slaps, and a good beating will be effective in the case of a “depressive.” Moreover, such treatment is precisely what the “depressive” himself resorts to when he decides to end it all: he merely employs more thorough means.

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Anything that can be done seems to me pernicious and at best futile. If need be I can rouse myself but not act. I understand all too well Wordsworth’s description of Coleridge: eternal activity without action.

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We do not adopt a belief because it is true (they are all true), but because some obscure power impels us to do so. When this power leaves us, we suffer prostration and collapse, a tête-à-tête with what is left of ourselves.

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Ferocity occurs in all conditions save in joy. Schadenfreude, malicious joy, is a misrepresentation. To do evil is a pleasure, not a joy. Joy, the one true victory over the world, is pure in its essence, hence irreducible to pleasure, which is always suspect, both in itself and in its manifestations.

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An existence constantly transfigured by failure.[🡕]

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(ed. This one is weirdly missing in the available English translations that I’ve checked)

I know of only one vision of poetry that is entirely satisfying: it is Emily Dickinson’s, when she says that in the presence of a true poem, she is seized by such a cold that she feels no fire could ever warm her.

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Nature’s great mistake was to have been unable to confine herself to one “kingdom”: juxtaposed with the vegetable, everything else seems inopportune, out of place. The sun should have sulked at the appearance of the first insect, and gone out altogether with the advent of the chimpanzee.

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Detachment cannot be learned: it is inscribed in a civilization. We do not tend toward it, we discover it in ourselves. I was thinking this when I read that a missionary, after eighteen years in Japan, had made only sixty converts, and old ones at that Moreover they escaped him at the last moment, dying in Japanese fashion, without remorse, without torments, worthy descendants of their ancestors who, to inure themselves, In the days of the Mongol wars, let themselves be impregnated by the nothingness of all things and by their own nothingness.

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We can meditate upon eternity only in a prone position. For a considerable period, eternity was the Orientals’ principal concern: did they not prefer the horizontal position? Once we lie down, time ceases to pass, to count. History is the product of a race that stands. As a vertical animal, man was to get into the habit of looking ahead, not only in space but in time as well. To which wretched origins we may trace the Future!

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A work is finished when we can no longer improve it, though we know it to be inadequate and incomplete. We are so overtaxed by it that we no longer have the power to add a single comma, however indispensable. What determines the degree to which a work is done is not a requirement of art or of truth, it is exhaustion and, even more, disgust.

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Buddhism calls anger, “corruption of the mind,” manicheism “root of the tree of death.” I know this, but what good does it do me to know?

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As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.

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No one is responsible for what he is nor even for what he does. This is obvious and everyone more or less agrees that it is so. Then why celebrate or denigrate? Because to exist is to evaluate, to emit judgments, and because abstention, when it is not the effect of apathy or cowardice, requires an effort no one manages to make.

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Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

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Try as I will, I cannot manage to scorn all those centuries during which men busied themselves with nothing more than perfecting a definition of God.

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As long as you live on this side of the terrible, you will find words to express it; once you know it from inside, you will no longer find a single one.

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There is no limit-disappointment.

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Grievances of every kind pass, but their source abides, and nothing has any effect on it: unassailable and unvarying, it is our fatum.

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However disabused one may be, it is impossible to live without any hope at all. We always keep one, unwittingly, and this unconscious hope makes up for all the explicit others we have rejected, exhausted.

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Pure fatigue—fatigue without cause, the kind that comes like a gift or a scourge: that is what helps me pull myself together, that is what affords me knowledge of my “self.” Once it leaves me, I am no more than an inanimate object.

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A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of his talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.

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“Amid your most intense activities, pause a moment to ‘consider’ your mind”—this advice is surely not offered to those who “consider” their minds night and day, and who thereby have no need to suspend their activities, for the good reason that they engage in none.

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A passion for musk is in itself an avowal. We know more about a stranger who yields himself up to it than about someone who is deaf to music and whom we see every day.[🡕]

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Satiety—I have just now uttered this word, and already I no longer know apropos of what, so readily does it apply to everything I feel and think, to everything I love and loathe, to satiety itself.

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To deliver blows none of which land, to attack everyone without anyone’s noticing, to shoot arrows whose poison you alone receive!

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Around midnight, a woman in tears comes up to me in the street: “They’ve knifed my husband, France is disgusting, luckily I’m from Brittany, they took away my children, they kept me on drugs for six months…” Not having realized at first that she was mad, so real her agony seemed (and in a sense was), I let her chatter on for a good half hour: talking did her good. Then I abandoned her, telling myself that the difference between us would be infinitesimal if I began to pour out my recriminations to the first comer.

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One night, climbing the stairs in the dark, I was halted by an invincible force rising from both within and without. Unable to take another step, I stood there nailed to the spot, petrified. IMPOSSIBILITY—this ordinary word came, more apropos than usual, to enlighten me as to myself, no less than as to the word as well: it had so often come to my aid, yet never as now. At last I understood, definitively, what it meant…

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An ancient cleaning woman, in answer to my “How’s everything going?” answers without looking up: “Taking its course.” This ultra-banal answer nearly brings me to tears.
The more such turns of speech, which deal with becoming, with the passage of time, with the course of things, are worn down, the more likely they are to acquire the quality of a revelation. But the truth is not that they create an exceptional state, only that you yourself were in that state without realizing it, and that it required only a sign or a pretext for the extraordinary to occur.

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“A pity,” you were saying, “that N has never produced anything.”
“So what! He exists. If he had given birth to books, if he had had the misfortune to ’realize’ himself, we wouldn’t have been talking about him the last hour.” The advantage of being someone is rarer than that of creating. To produce is easy; what is difficult is to scorn the use of one’s gifts.

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Filming a scene, there are countless takes of the same incident. Someone watching in the street—obviously a provincial—can’t get over it: “After this, I’ll never go to the movies again.”
One might react similarly with regard to anything whose underside one has seen, whose secret one has seized. Yet, by an obnubilation which has something of the miraculous about it, there are gynecologists who are attracted to their patients, gravediggers who father children, incurables who lay plans, skeptics who write…

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[…] And so on, until I wake up.
The interminable is the specialty of the indecisive. They cannot mark life out for their own, and still less their dreams, in which they perpetuate their hesitations, pusillanimities, scruples. They are ideally qualified for nightmare.

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[…] Whereas my mother ended the last note she ever sent me with this testamentary sentence: “Whatever people try to do, they’ll regret it sooner or later.”
Nor can I even boast of having acquired this vice of regret by my own setbacks. It precedes me, it participates in the patrimony of my tribe. What a legacy, such unfitness for illusion!

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I may change my opinion on the same subject, the same event, ten, twenty, thirty times in the course of a single day. And to think that each time, like the worst impostor, I dare utter the word “truth”!

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Anyone who gives himself up to writing believes—without realizing the fact—that his work will survive the years, the ages, time itself… If he felt, while he was at work on it, that it was perishable, he would leave off where he was, he could never finish. Activity and credulity are correlative terms.

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Two enemies—the same man divided.

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Most of our troubles come from our first impulses. The slightest enthusiasm costs more than a crime.

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Since we remember dearly only our ordeals, it is ultimately the sick, the persecuted, the victims in every realm who will have lived to the best advantage. The others—the lucky ones—have a life, of course, but not the memory of a life.

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What a bore, someone who doesn’t deign to make an impression. Vain people are almost always annoying, but they make an effort, they take the trouble: they are bores who don’t want to be bores, and we are grateful to them for that: we end by enduring them, even by seeking them out. On the other hand, we turn livid with fury in the presence of someone who pays no attention whatever to the effect he makes. What are we to say to him, and what are we to expect from him? Either keep some vestiges of the monkey, or else stay home.

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Not the fear of effort but the fear of success explains more than one failure.

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We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.

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Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.

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We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.

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Seen from the outside, harmony reigns in every sect, clan, and party; seen from the inside, discord. Conflicts in a monastery are as frequent and as envenomed as in any society. Even when they desert hell, men do so only to reconstruct it elsewhere.

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Anxiety is not provoked: it tries to find a justification for itself, and in order to do so seizes upon anything, the vilest pretexts, to which it clings once it has invented them. A reality which precedes its particular expressions, its varieties, anxiety provokes itself, engenders itself, it is “infinite creation,” and as such is more likely to suggest the workings of the divinity than those of the psyche.

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Automatic melancholy: an elegiac robot.

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In order not to have to resolve them, I have turned all my practical difficulties into theoretical ones. Faced with the Insoluble, I breathe at last…

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To a student who wanted to know where I stood with regard to the author of Zarathustra, I replied that I had long since stopped reading him. Why? “I find him too naïve…”
I hold his enthusiasms, his fervors against him. He demolished so many idols only to replace them with others: a false iconoclast, with adolescent aspects and a certain virginity, a certain innocence inherent in his solitary’s career. He observed men only from a distance. Had he come closer, he could have neither conceived nor promulgated the superman, that preposterous, laughable, even grotesque chimera, a crotchet which could occur only to a mind without time to age, to know the long serene disgust of detachment.
Marcus Aurelius is much closer to me. Not a moment’s hesitation between the lyricism of frenzy and the prose of acceptance: I find more comfort, more hope even, in the weary emperor than in the thundering prophet.

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“Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?”—That’s what I’d like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

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Listening to the weather report, I feel a strong response to the words ”scattered rain.” Which certainly proves that poetry is in ourselves and not in the expression, though scattered is an adjective capable of setting up a certain vibration.

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(ed. This one is weirdly missing in the available English translations that I’ve checked)

We desire death only in vague discomforts; we flee from it at the slightest precise pain.

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Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.

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If I have been able to hold out till now, it is because each blow, which seemed intolerable at the time, was followed by a second which was worse, then a third, and so on. If I were in hell, I’d want its circles to multiply, in order to count on a new ordeal, more trying than its predecessor. A salutary policy, with regard to torments at least.

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What music appeals to in us it is difficult to know; what we do know is that music reaches a zone so deep that madness itself cannot penetrate there.

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We should have been excused from lugging a body: the burden of the self was enough.

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I like to read the way a chorus girl does: identifying myself with the author and the book. Any other attitude makes me think of dissecting corpses.

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Years and years to waken from that sleep in which the others loll; then years and years to escape that awakening…

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Think about those who haven’t long to live, who know that everything is over and done with, except the time in which the thought of their end unrolls. Deal with that time. Write for gladiators…

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All things considered, there have been more affirmations than negations—at least till now. So we may deny without remorse. Beliefs will always weigh more in the scales.

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Gogol, in hopes of a “regeneration,” journeys to Nazareth and discovers he is as bored there as “in a Russian railroad station”—this is what happens to us all when we look outside ourselves for what can exist only inside.

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Why fear the nothing in store for us when it is no different from the nothing which preceded us: this argument of the Ancients against the fear of death is unacceptable as consolation. Before, we had the luck not to exist; now we exist, and it is this particle of existence, hence of misfortune, which dreads death. Particle is not the word, since each of us prefers himself to the universe, at any rate considers himself equal to it.

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Lucidity without the corrective of ambition leads to stagnation. It is essential that the one sustain the other, that the one combat the other without winning, for a work, for a life to be possible.

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We cannot forgive those we have praised to the skies, we are impatient to break with them, to snap the most delicate chain of all: the chain of admiration…, not out of insolence, but out of an aspiration to find our bearings, to be free, to be… ourselves. Which we manage only by an act of injustice.

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The problem of responsibility would have a meaning only if we had been consulted before our birth and had consented to be precisely who we are.

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The energy and virulence of my taedium vitae continue to astound me. So much vigor in a disease so decrepit! To this paradox I owe my present incapacity to choose my final hour.

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

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A book is a postponed suicide.

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A monster, however horrible, secretly attracts us, pursues us, haunts us. He represents, enlarged, our advantages and our miseries, he proclaims us, he is our standard-bearer.

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I know peace only when my ambitions sleep. Once they waken, anxiety repossesses me. Life is a state of ambition. The mole digging his tunnels is ambitious. Ambition is in effect every­where, and we see its traces on the faces of the dead themselves.

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Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.

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Truth abides in the individual drama. If I suffer authentically, I suffer much more than an individual, I transcend the sphere of my selfhood, I rejoin the essence of others. The only way to proceed toward the universal is to concern ourselves exclusively with what concerns ourselves.

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The misfortune of being incapable of neutral states except by reflection and effort. What an idiot achieves at the outset, we must struggle night and day to attain, and only by fits and starts!

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Most subverters, visionaries, and saviors have been either epileptics or dyspeptics. There is unanimity as to the virtues of epilepsy; gastric upheavals are regarded, on the other hand, as less meritorious. Yet nothing is more conducive to subversion than a digestion which refuses to be forgotten.

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When we are in the depths of depression, everything which feeds it, affords it further substance, also raises it to a level where we can no longer follow and thereby renders it too great, excessive: scarcely surprising that we should reach the point of no longer regarding it as our own.

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Everything that is engenders, sooner or later, nightmares. Let us try, therefore, to invent something better than being.

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For the victim of anxiety, there is no difference between success and fiasco. His reaction to the one is the same as to the other: both trouble him equally.

✻

When I torment myself a little too much for not working, I tell myself that I might just as well be dead and that then I would be working still less…

✻

We should repeat to ourselves, every day: I am one of the billions dragging himself across the earth’s surface. One, and no more. This banality justifies any conclusion, any behavior or action: debauchery, chastity, suicide, work, crime, sloth, or rebellion… Whence it follows that each man is right to do what he does.

✻

To express an obsession is to project it outside yourself, to hunt it down, to exorcise it. Obsessions are the demons of a world without faith.

✻

Once we step into a cemetery, a feeling of utter mockery does away with any metaphysical concern. Those who look for “mystery” everywhere do not necessarily get to the bottom of things. Most often “mystery,” like “the absolute,” corresponds only to a mannerism of the mind. It is a word we should use only when we cannot do otherwise, in really desperate cases.

✻

Any profound impression is voluptuous or funereal—or both at once.

✻

Annihilating affords a sense of power, flatters something obscure, something original in us. It is not by erecting but by pulverizing that we may divine the secret satisfactions of a god. Whence the lure of destruction and the illusions it provokes among the frenzied of any era.

✻

Prosperous societies are far more fragile than the others, since it remains for them to achieve only their own ruin, comfort not being an ideal when we possess it, still less of one when it has been around for generations. Not to mention the fact that nature has not included well-being in her calculations and could not do so without perishing herself.

✻

The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools.

✻

Romans of the decadence enjoyed only what they called Greek leisure (otium graecum), the thing they had most despised in the period of their vigor. The analogy with today’s civilizations is so flagrant it would be indecent to insist on it.

✻

The West: a sweet-smelling rottenness, a perfumed corpse.

✻

So long as a nation keeps the awareness of its superiority, it is fierce and respected; once it loses that awareness, a nation becomes humanized, and no longer counts.

✻

When I rage against the age, I can calm myself merely by thinking of what will happen, of the retrospective jealousy of those who come after us. In certain respects, we belong to the old humanity, the humanity that could still regret paradise. But those who come after us will not even have the recourse of that regret, they will not even have an idea of it, not even the word!

✻

When, just after the First World War, electricity was installed in the village where I was born, there was a general murmur of protest, then mute desolation. But when electricity was installed in the churches (there were three), everyone was convinced the Antichrist had come and, with him, the end of time.
These Carpathian peasants had seen clearly, had seen far: Emerging from prehistory, they knew already, in that day and age, what “civilized” men have known only recently.

✻

It is my prejudice against everything that turns out well that has given me a taste for reading history.
Ideas are unsuited to a final agony; they die, of course, but without knowing how to die, whereas an event exists only with a view to its end. A sufficient reason to prefer the company of historians to that of philosophers.

✻

“The French don’t want to work any more, they all want to write,” my concierge told me, unaware that she was then and there passing judgment on all old civilizations.

✻

The further man proceeds, the less he is in a position to solve his problems, and when, at the apex of his blindness, he will be convinced he is on the point of success, then the unheard-of will occur.

✻

I would bestir myself, at best, for the Apocalypse, but for a revolution… To collaborate with an ending or a genesis, an ultimate or initial calamity, yes, but not with a change for some better or worse…

✻

If humanity has such love for saviors, those fanatics who so shamelessly believe in themselves, it is because humanity supposes they believe in it.

✻

The worst crimes are committed out of enthusiasm, a morbid state responsible for almost all public and private disasters.

✻

In a metropolis as in a hamlet, what we still love best is to watch the fall of one of our kind.

✻

Strictly speaking, history does not repeat itself, but since the illusions man is capable of are limited in number, they always return in another disguise, thereby giving some ultradecrepit filth a look of novelty and a tragic glaze.

✻

Life would become endurable only among a humanity which would no longer have any illusions in reserve, a humanity completely disabused and delighted to be so.

✻

[…] This prospect is depressing, hence likely.

✻

“Enlightened despotism”: the only regime that can attract a disabused mind, one incapable of being the accomplice of revolutions since it is not even the accomplice of history.

✻

I am stirred, even overwhelmed each time I happen upon an innocent person. Where does he come from? What is he after? Doesn’t such an apparition herald some disaster? It is a very special disturbance we suffer in the presence of someone there is no way of calling our kind.

✻

If everyone had seen through everything, if everyone had “understood,” history would have ceased long since. But we are fundamentally, biologically unsuited to “understand.” And even if everyone understood except for one, history would be perpetuated because of that one, because of his blindness. Because of a single illusion!

✻

X maintains we are at the end of a “cosmic cycle” and that soon everything will fall apart. And he does not doubt this for one moment.
At the same time, he is the father of a—numerous—family. With certitudes like his, what aberration has deluded him into bringing into a doomed world one child after the next? If we foresee the End, if we are sure it will be coming soon, if we even anticipate it, better to do so alone. One does not procreate on Patmos.

✻

We pursue whatever we pursue out of torment—a need for torment. Our very quest for salvation is a torment, the subtlest, the best camouflaged of all.

✻

Saint Seraphim of Sarov, in his fifteen years of complete seclusion, opened his cell door to no one, not even to the bishop who occasionally visited the hermitage. “Silence,” he would say, “brings man closer to God and makes him, on earth, like unto the angels.”
What the saint should have added is that silence is never deeper than in the impossibility of prayer…

✻

In anxiety, a man clings to whatever can reinforce, can stimulate his providential discomfort: to try to cure him of it is to destroy his equilibrium, anxiety being the basis of his existence and his prosperity. The cunning confessor knows it is necessary, knows that we cannot do without anxiety once we have known it. Since he dares not proclaim its benefits, he employs a detour—he vaunts remorse, an admitted, an honorable anxiety. His custom­ers are grateful; hence he manages to keep them readily enough, whereas his lay colleagues struggle and grovel to keep theirs.

✻

The not at all negligible advantage of having greatly hated men is that one comes to endure them by the exhaustion of this very hatred.

✻

I was alone in that cemetery overlooking the village when a pregnant woman came in. I left at once, in order not to look at this corpse-bearer at close range, nor to ruminate upon the contrast between an aggressive womb and the time-worn tombs—between a false promise and the end of all promises.</mark>

✻

Euphoria. Incapable of articulating my habitual moods and the reflections they engender, impelled by some unknown power, I exulted without motive, and it is just such jubilation, of unknown origin, I reminded myself, which is the experience of those who do and strive, those who produce. They neither can nor will reflect on what denies them. And if they did, it would be of no consequence, as was the case for me that memorable day.

✻

The worst reproach to be made against police states is that they oblige—for prudence’s sake—the destruction of letters and diaries, i.e., what is least false in literature.

✻

It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.

✻

The blank time of meditation is, in truth, the only “full” time. We should never blush to accumulate vacant moments—vacant in appearance, filled in fact. To meditate is a supreme leisure, whose secret has been lost.

✻

I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which has spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations.

✻

An acrobat? An orchestra conductor caught up by the Idea? He rushes in, then calms down, alternates the allegro with the andante, a master of himself like the fakirs or the swindlers. While he is talking, he seems to be seeking something, but one never knows what: an expert in the art of counterfeiting the thinker. If he were to say a single thing that was perfectly clear, he would be lost. Since he is as ignorant as his hearers of what he wants to say or what he wants, he can go on for hours without exhausting the amazement of the puppets listening to him.

✻

A privilege to live in conflict with one’s times. At every moment one is aware one does not think like the others. This state of acute dissimilarity, however indigent or sterile it appears, nonetheless possesses a philosophical status which one would be at a loss to seek in cogitations attuned to events.

✻

Getting up with my head full of plans, I would be working, I was sure of it, all morning long. No sooner had I sat down at my desk than the odious, vile, and persuasive refrain: “What do you expect of this world?” stopped me short. And I returned, as usual, to my bed with the hope of finding some answer, of going back to sleep…

✻

We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface…

✻

When you know yourself well and do not despise yourself utterly, it is because you are too exhausted to indulge in extreme feelings.

✻

Supremacy of regret: the actions we have not performed constitute, by the very fact that they pursue us and that we continually think about them, the sole contents of our conscious­ness.

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Each time you find yourself at a turning-point, the best thing is to lie down and let the hours pass.[🡕] Resolutions made standing up are worthless: they are dictated either by pride or by fear. Prone, we still know these two scourges, but in a more attenuated, more intemporal form.

✻

When someone complains that his life has come to nothing, we need merely remind him that life itself is in an analogous situation, if not worse.

✻

Works die: fragments, not having lived, cannot die either.

✻

The satisfaction we take from performing a task (especially when we have no belief in the task and even disdain it) shows to what degree we still belong to the rabble.

✻

My merit is not to be totally ineffectual but to have wanted to be.

✻

Mine still, this moment passes by, escapes me, and is buried forever. Am I going to commit myself with the next? I make up my mind: it is here, it belongs to me—and already is long since past. From morning to night, fabricating the past!

✻

After having, to no avail, tried everything among the mystics, he had only one recourse: to founder in wisdom…

✻

”…the feeling of being everything and the evidence of being nothing.” I happened across this phrase in my youth, and was overwhelmed by it. Everything I felt in those days, and everything I would feel from then on, was summed up in this extraordinary banal formula, the synthesis of expansion and failure, ecstasy and impasse. Most often it is not in a paradox but in a truism that a revelation appears.

✻

The appetite for torment is for some what the lure of gain is for others.

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I shall never understand how we can live knowing that we are not—to say the least!—eternal.

( ed. This may seem like a contradiction, since when reading Cioran, death appears to be the salvation from a shitty life. But here, Cioran is playing a game of imagination, trying to envision what an ideal, utopian life might be like. And no matter how bizarre the idea that comes to mind, Cioran realizes that even an apparently ideal life would be troubled by the problem of death. So, when imagining a utopian scenario, he recognizes that the first requirement (“to say the least!”) must necessarily be immortality. Only after that could one worry about making life good. The tragedy of real life is that neither of these two requirements is met. )

✻

Lucidity does not extirpate the desire to live—far from it, lucidity merely makes us unsuited to life.

✻

Unconsciousness is the secret, the “vital principle” of life… It is the sole recourse against the self, against the disease of being individualized, against the debilitating effect of the state of consciousness, a state so formidable, so demanding, that it must be reserved for athletes alone.

✻

Man has said what he had to say. He should rest now. But refuses, and though he has entered into his “survivor” phase, he fidgets as if he were on the threshold of an astonishing career.

✻

A cry means something only in a created universe. If there is no creator, what is the good of calling attention to yourself?

✻

In everything, only the beginning and the outcome matter, doing and undoing. The way toward being and the way out of being—that is breathing, whereas being as such is merely an asphyxiator.

✻

With the passage of time, I am convinced that my first years were a paradise. But I am undoubtedly mistaken. If there was ever a paradise, I must look for it earlier than all my years.

✻

I shall no longer read the sages—they have done me too much harm. I should have surrendered to my instincts, let my madness flourish. I have done just the opposite, I have put on the mask of reason, and the mask has ended by replacing my face and usurping all the rest.

✻

If I followed my natural inclination, I should blow up the world. And it is because I lack the courage to follow it that, out of penitence, I try to stupefy myself with the company of those who have found peace.

✻

The name of an actress famous in my childhood suddenly occurs to me. Who still remembers her? Much more than any philosophical meditation, it is details of this sort which reveal the scandalous reality and unreality of time.

✻

If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.

✻

If we hope to see the number of our disappointments or our frenzies diminish, then on every occasion we must remember that we are here to make each other wretched, and that to rebel against this state of affairs is to undermine the very foundations of communal life.

✻

When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.

✻

The Truth we do not always pursue; but when we do so passionately, violently, we hate whatever is expression, whatever derives from words and forms, all the noble lies, even further from the truth than the vulgar ones.

✻

Only what proceeds from emotion or from cynicism is real. All the rest is “talent.”

✻

Our physiological miseries help us to envisage the future with some confidence: they dispense us from tormenting ourselves overmuch, they do their best so that none of our long-range projects has time to wear out all our available energies.

✻

To deprecate your own kind, to vilify and pulverize them, to attack their foundations, to undermine your very basis, to destroy your point of departure, to punish your origins…, to curse all those non-elect, lesser breeds, torn between imposture and elegy, whose sole mission is not to have one…

✻

When the habit of seeing things as they are turns into a mania, we lament the madman we have been and are no longer.

✻

Philosophy is taught only in the agora, in a garden, or at home. The lecture chair is the grave of philosophy, the death of any living thought, the dais is the mind in mourning.

✻

That I can still desire proves that I lack an exact perception of reality, that I am distracted, that I am a thousand miles from the Truth. “Man,” we read in the Dhammapada, “is prey to desire only because he does not see things as they are.”

✻

The perception of the Precarious raised to the level of vision, of mystical experience.

✻

In very powerful sensations of pain, much more than in very slight ones, we observe ourselves, we divide into an external witness and the moaning, screaming sufferer. Everything which borders on torment wakens the psychologist in each of us, as well as the experimenter: we want to see how far we can go in the intolerable.

✻

What is injustice compared to disease? True, we may find it unjust to be sick. Moreover that is how each of us reacts, without troubling as to whether he is right or wrong. Sickness is: nothing more real than disease. If we call it unjust, we must dare to do as much with Being itself—we must speak, then, of the injustice of existing.

✻

A broadcast about wolves, with recordings of their howls. What a language! The most heartrending I know, and I shall never forget it. From now on, in moments of excessive solitude, I need merely recall those sounds to have the sense of belonging to a community.

✻

A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything… Was boredom unknown to them?
This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity.
Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs—something, anything… Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

✻

A nation achieves and retains pre-eminence as long as it accepts conventions which are necessarily clumsy, as long as it is given over to prejudices without regarding them as such. Once it calls them by their name, everything is unmasked, everything is compromised.
To seek to rule, to take a role, to make the law—such things cannot be done without a powerful dose of stupidity: history, in its essence, is stupid… It continues, it advances, because the nations liquidate their prejudices one after the other. If they were to be rid of them all at the same time, there would be nothing left but a blessed universal disintegration.

✻

In paradise, objects and beings, assaulted by light from all sides, cast no shadow. Which is to say that they lack reality, like anything that is unbroached by darkness and deserted by death.

✻

Our first intuitions are the true ones. What I thought of so many things in my first youth seems to me increasingly right, and after so many detours and distractions, I now come back to it, aggrieved that I could have erected my existence on the ruin of those revelations.

✻

At the street fair, watching a tumbler grimacing, shouting, exhausting himself, I told myself that he was doing his duty, whereas I was evading mine…

✻

To manifest oneself, to produce in any realm is the characteristic of a more or less camouflaged fanatic. If we do not regard ourselves as entrusted with a mission, existence is difficult; action, impossible.

✻

No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.

✻

Death is the providence of those who will have had the taste and the talent for fiasco—the recompense of all who have come to nothing, who wanted not to… It warrants them, it is their way of winning. On the other hand, for the others, those who have labored to succeed, and who have succeeded: what a denial, what a slap in the face!

✻

An Egyptian monk, after fifteen years of complete solitude, received a packet of letters from his family and friends. He did not open them, he flung them into the fire in order to escape the assault of memory. We cannot sustain communion with ourself and our thoughts if we allow ghosts to appear, to prevail. The desert signifies not so much a new life as the death of the past: at last we have escaped our own history. In society, no less than in the Thebaid, the letters we write, and those we receive, testify to the fact that we are in chains, that we have broken none of the bonds, that we are merely slaves and deserve to be so.

✻

In five hundred thousand years, it appears that England will be entirely submerged. If I were an Englishman I should lay down my arms at once.
Each of us has his unit of time. For one it is the day, the week, the month, or the year; for another, it is a decade, or a century… These units, still on the human scale, are compatible with any plan, any task.
There are some, however, who take time itself for their unit, and sometimes raise themselves above it: for them, what task, what plan deserves to be taken seriously? A man who sees too far, who is contemporary with the whole future, can no longer act or even move…

✻

An obsession with the precarious accompanies me in every circumstance: mailing a letter this morning, I told myself it was addressed to a mortal.

✻

I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.

✻

To shake people up, to wake them from their sleep, while knowing you are committing a crime and that it would be a thousand times better to leave them alone, since when they wake, too, you have nothing to offer them…

✻

A poor wretch who feels time, who is its victim, its martyr, who experiences nothing else, who is time at each moment, knows what a metaphysician or a poet divines only by grace of a collapse or a miracle.

✻

I have abused the word disgust. But what other can I use to indicate a state in which exasperation is continually corrected by lassitude, and lassitude by exasperation?

✻

Anyone may now and then have the sense of occupying only a point and a moment; to have such a sense day and night, hour by hour, is less frequent, and it is from this experience, this datum, that one turns toward nirvana or sarcasm—or toward both at once.

✻

There are certain moments when, remote as we are from any faith, we can conceive of only God as our interlocutor. To address ourselves elsewhere seems an impossibility, a madness. Solitude, in its extreme reaches, requires a form of conversation, also extreme.

✻

When you live past the age of rebellion, and you still rebel, you seem to yourself a kind of senile Lucifer.

✻

Ultimately, it is entirely a matter of indifference whether we are something, even if we are God. On this, with a little pressure, almost everyone might be brought to agree. But how does it happen then that everyone aspires to further life, to additional being, and that there is no one who strives to sink, to descend toward the ideal default?

✻

A thought which is not secretly stamped by fatality is interchangeable, worthless, is merely thought…

✻

“What’s wrong—what’s the matter with you?” Nothing, nothing’s the matter, I’ve merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don’t know where to turn, what to run for…