Emil Cioran - The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.

Emil Cioran
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.

Emil Cioran
I am for the most part so convinced that everything is lacking in basis, consequence, justification, that if someone dared to contradict me, even the man I most admire, he would seem to me a charlatan or a fool.

Emil Cioran
What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?

Emil Cioran
I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.

Emil Cioran
I think of so many people who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death.

Emil Cioran
My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

Emil Cioran
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.

Emil Cioran
Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!

Emil Cioran
To have committed every crime but that of being a father.

Emil Cioran
We had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy.

Emil Cioran
To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!

Emil Cioran
This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique - and insignificant.

Emil Cioran
God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.

Emil Cioran
Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying? - that void is consciousness itself.

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

Emil Cioran
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?

Emil Cioran
There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

Emil Cioran
Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?

Emil Cioran
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 where that elsewhere is.

Emil Cioran
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.

Emil Cioran
There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books.

Emil Cioran
The real, the unique misfortune: to see the light of day. A disaster which dates back to aggressiveness, to the seed of expansion and rage within origins, to the tendency to the worst which first shook them up.

Emil Cioran
Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral…

Emil Cioran
The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

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

Emil Cioran
If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.

Emil Cioran
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.

Emil Cioran
Only what has been conceived in solitude, face to face with God, endures — whether one is a believer or not.

Emil Cioran
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.

Emil Cioran