Emil Cioran - The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

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

Emil Cioran
I was walking late one night along a tree-lined path; a chestnut fell at my feet. The noise it made as it burst, the resonance it provoked in me, and an upheaval out of all proportion to this insignificant event thrust me into miracle, into the rapture of the definitive, as if there were no more questions—only answers. I was drunk on a thousand unexpected discoveries, none of which I could make use of. This is how I nearly reached the Supreme. But instead I went on with my walk.

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

Emil Cioran
God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.

Emil Cioran
Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.

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

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
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.

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

Emil Cioran
One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.

Emil Cioran
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 abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.

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

Emil Cioran
I long to be free—desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.

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
Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught.

Emil Cioran
Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do. One so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it.

Emil Cioran
The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.

Emil Cioran
The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them.

Emil Cioran
Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.

Emil Cioran
Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.

Emil Cioran
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.

Emil Cioran
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.

Emil Cioran
To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.

Emil Cioran
The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.

Emil Cioran
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.

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

Emil Cioran
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?

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

Emil Cioran
I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.

Emil Cioran