Tag: Cioran (23 entries)
Emil Mihai Cioran.
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…
The Catastrophe of Birth
In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer makes a similar comment, but about Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. He writes that when it came to describing Hell, Dante must have had plenty of material to work with, since our world is full of suffering and torture, but when it came to describing Heaven and its wonderful pleasures, he must have lacked inspiration, for the same reason. Read the full page
The Suffering of the Everyday Banalities of Life
Just mustering the motivation to peel oneself from bed should be grounds for receiving a gold medal from the International Olympic Committee. Read the full page
Excess lucidity
The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. Read the full page
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.
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
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…
When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.
A thought which is not secretly stamped by fatality is interchangeable, worthless, is merely thought…
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.
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.
An obsession with the precarious accompanies me in every circumstance: mailing a letter this morning, I told myself it was addressed to a mortal.
What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.
“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…
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…
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.
When you know yourself well and do not despise yourself utterly, it is because you are too exhausted to indulge in extreme feelings.
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.
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
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.
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?