Emil Cioran - The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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

Emil Cioran
It is easier to get on with vices than with virtues. The vices, accommodating by nature, help each other, are full of mutual indulgence, whereas the jealous virtues combat and annihilate each other, showing in everything their incompatibility and their intolerance.

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

Emil Cioran
Even in childhood I watched the hours flow, independent of any reference, any action, any event, the disjunction of time from what was not itself, its autonomous existence, its special status, its empire, its tyranny. I remember quite clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts. Time was coming unstuck from being—at my expense.

Emil Cioran
The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.

Emil Cioran
No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.

Emil Cioran
The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?

Emil Cioran
Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

Emil Cioran
Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.

Emil Cioran
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

Emil Cioran
"What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself."

Emil Cioran
When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.

Emil Cioran
It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.

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
I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.

Emil Cioran
Vengeance is a need, the most intense and profound of all, and…each man must satisfy it, if only in words. If we stifle that need, we expose ourselves to certain disturbances. More than one disorder—perhaps all disorders—derive from a vengeance too long postponed.

Emil Cioran
Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.

Emil Cioran
The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.

Emil Cioran
Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.

Emil Cioran
If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.

Emil Cioran
We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

Emil Cioran
The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools.

Emil Cioran
"What's wrong - what's the matter with you?" Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for...

Emil Cioran
Lucidity is the only vice which makes us free — free in a desert.

Emil Cioran
At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j'ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.

Emil Cioran
I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.

Emil Cioran
To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell

Emil Cioran
I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.

Emil Cioran
I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.

Emil Cioran
What music appeals to in us it is difficult to know; what we do know is that music reaches a zone so deep that madness itself cannot penetrate there.

Emil Cioran