Emil Cioran - Born Quotes

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The reaction against your own thought in itself lends life to thought. How this reaction is born is hard to describe, because it identifies with the very rare intellectual tragedies. ––The tension, the degree and level of intensity of a thought proceeds from its internal antinomies, which in turn are derived from the unsolvable contradictions of a soul. Thought cannot solve the contradictions of the soul. As far as linear thinking is concerned, thoughts mirror themselves in other thoughts, instead of mirroring a destiny.

Emil Cioran
Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.

Emil Cioran
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

Emil Cioran
Unlike Job, I have not cursed the day I was born; all the other days, on the contrary, I have covered with my anathemas.

Emil Cioran
Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!

Emil Cioran
Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.

Emil Cioran
We say: he has no talent, only tone. But tone is precisely what cannot be invented—we're born with it. Tone is an inherited grace, the privilege some of us have of making our organic pulsations felt—tone is more than talent, it is its essence.

Emil Cioran
Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.

Emil Cioran
We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

Emil Cioran
Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.

Emil Cioran
We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.

Emil Cioran
But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle...

Emil Cioran
Only thoughts that are randomly born die. The other thoughts we carry with us without knowing them. They have abandoned themselves to forgetfulness so that they can be with us all the time.

Emil Cioran
If I used to ask myself, over a coffin, "what good did it do the occupant to be born?" I now put the same question about anyone alive.

Emil Cioran
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... with a foolish grin.

Emil Cioran
I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if, creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity. Yet in a less assured mood, birth seems a calamity I would be miserable not having known.

Emil Cioran
Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.

Emil Cioran