Tag: Cioran
Emil Mihai Cioran.
https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2025/06/the-catastrophe-of-birth.html[🡕] Continue reading
The Suffering of the Everyday Banalities of Life
r/Pessimism, u/forestofdoom2022 Continue reading
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Against the idea that suicide is not worth it, like some important authors say instead
In reality, we don’t kill ourselves because the rationalized suicide is basically impossible for everyone… Read the full page
Solitude: so fulfilling that the merest rendezvous is a crucifixion.
Emil Cioran – Anathemas and Admirations
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…
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
A thought which is not secretly stamped by fatality is interchangeable, worthless, is merely thought…
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
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.
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
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.
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
An obsession with the precarious accompanies me in every circumstance: mailing a letter this morning, I told myself it was addressed to a mortal.
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
“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…
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
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…
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
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.
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
When you know yourself well and do not despise yourself utterly, it is because you are too exhausted to indulge in extreme feelings.
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
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.
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
The Trouble With Being Born – Emil Cioran
No sooner are they [the eyes] 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… Read the full page
To suffer is to produce knowledge.
Emil Cioran – The New Gods (“Le Mauvais démiurge”, literally “The Evil Demiurge”)
When the problem of happiness supplants that of knowledge, philosophy abandons its proper domain to engage in a suspect activity: it concerns itself with man… Questions it would once have scorned asking now attract its attention, and it attempts to answer them in all seriousness. “How is suffering to be avoided?” is the first to entice it. In a phase of lassitude, increasingly alien to impersonal concerns, to the thirst for knowledge, it abandons speculation and to the truths that disturb prefers those that console.
Emil Cioran – The Temptation to Exist
As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?
Emil Cioran – On the Heights of Despair