Emil Mihai Cioran / 1911–1995 / near Hermannstadt [Nagyszeben], Kingdom of Hungary (now Sibiu, Romania) / Novelist, Essayist, Aphorist
Absurdity
On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos. When all the current reasons—moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on—no longer guide one’s life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.
Sur les cimes du désespoir [On the Heights of Despair] (1934).
Cities
Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?
Histoire et utopie [History and Utopia] (1960).
Consciousness
Knowledge is the plague of life, and consciousness, an open wound in its heart.
Sur les cimes du désespoir [On the Heights of Despair] (1934).
Haven’t people learned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles?
Sur les cimes du désespoir [On the Heights of Despair] (1934).
Consciousness is nature’s nightmare.
Des larmes et des saints [Tears and Saints] (1937).
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.
De l’inconvénient d’être né [The Trouble with Being Born] (1973).
Convictions
We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.
De l’inconvénient d’être né [The Trouble with Being Born] (1973).
Courage
Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself.
Écartelèment [Drawn and Quartered] (1983).
Death
Tell me how you want to die, and I’ll tell you who you are.
Des larmes et des saints [Tears and Saints] (1937).
As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.
Des larmes et des saints [Tears and Saints] (1937).
We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die.—Didn’t you know that’s how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?
Écartelèment [Drawn and Quartered] (1983).
Education
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.
De l’inconvénient d’être né [The Trouble with Being Born] (1973).
Epiphany
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.
De l’inconvénient d’être né [The Trouble with Being Born] (1973).
Eros
No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never.
Le livre des leurres [The Book of Delusions] (1936).
Existence
I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.
Sur les cimes du désespoir [On the Heights of Despair] (1934).
Can it really be that for us existence means exile, and nothingness, home?
Sur les cimes du désespoir [On the Heights of Despair] (1934).
What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!
Le livre des leurres [The Book of Delusions] (1936).
This world was created from God’s fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator.
Des larmes et des saints [Tears and Saints] (1937).
By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . .
Précis de décomposition [Précis of Decomposition] (1949].
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.
De l’inconvénient d’être né [The Trouble with Being Born] (1973).
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.
De l’inconvénient d’être né [The Trouble with Being Born] (1973).
Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one’s reach.
De l’inconvénient d’être né [The Trouble with Being Born] (1973).
What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.
Écartelèment [Drawn and Quartered] (1983).
Fear
To fear is to die every minute.
Des larmes et des saints [Tears and Saints] (1937).
Freedom
If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.
La tentation d’exister [The Temptation to Exist] (1956).
No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
Histoire et utopie [History and Utopia] (1960).
For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
Histoire et utopie [History and Utopia] (1960).
One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.
Écartelèment [Drawn and Quartered] (1983).
God
I am displeased with everything. If they made me God, I would immediately resign.
Sur les cimes du désespoir [On the Heights of Despair] (1934).
I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him every day.
Le livre des leurres [The Book of Delusions] (1936).
The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It’s not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.
Des larmes et des saints [Tears and Saints] (1937).
Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory as that will ever be found again.
De l’inconvénient d’être né [The Trouble with Being Born] (1973).
History
Isn’t history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
Histoire et utopie [History and Utopia] (1960).
Human Condition
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 aesthetic 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?
Sur les cimes du désespoir [On the Heights of Despair] (1934).
He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.
La chute dans le temps [The Fall into Time] (1964).
What are you waiting for in order to give up?
De l’inconvénient d’être né [The Trouble with Being Born] (1973).
Ideas
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.
Précis de décomposition [Précis of Decomposition] (1949].
Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation.
Précis de décomposition [Précis of Decomposition] (1949].
Life
One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death’s prisoner.
Sur les cimes du désespoir [On the Heights of Despair] (1934).
If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.
Sur les cimes du désespoir [On the Heights of Despair] (1934).
Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?
Précis de décomposition [Précis of Decomposition] (1949).
Love
Love, a tacit agreement between two unhappy parties to overestimate each other.
La chute dans le temps [The Fall into Time] (1964).
Memory
One of the biggest paradoxes of our world: memories vanish when we want to remember, but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget.
Sur les cimes du désespoir [On the Heights of Despair] (1934).
Music
A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.
Des larmes et des saints [Tears and Saints] (1937).
If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
Syllogismes de l’amertume [Syllogisms of Bitterness] (1952).
Old Age
Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
Écartelèment [Drawn and Quartered] (1983).
Patriotism
What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.
Histoire et utopie [History and Utopia] (1960).
Philosophers
. . . all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint.
Des larmes et des saints [Tears and Saints] (1937).
It has been a long time since philosophers have read men’s souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.
De l’inconvénient d’être né [The Trouble with Being Born] (1973).
Religion
Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world.
Des larmes et des saints [Tears and Saints] (1937).
Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious.
La tentation d’exister [The Temptation to Exist] (1956).
Sleep
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher’s the poet’s equal there.
La tentation d’exister [The Temptation to Exist] (1956).
Suffering
To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously.
Le livre des leurres [The Book of Delusions] (1936).
Suicide
No one commits suicide for external reasons, only because of inner disequilibrium. Under similar adverse circumstances, some are indifferent, some are moved, some are driven to suicide.
Sur les cimes du désespoir [On the Heights of Despair] (1934).
Why don’t I commit suicide? Because I am as sick of death as I am of life.
Sur les cimes du désespoir [On the Heights of Despair] (1934).
In a single second we do away with all seconds; God himself could not do as much.
Précis de décomposition [Précis of Decomposition] (1949].
I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I’d have killed myself right away.
Syllogismes de l’amertume [Syllogisms of Bitterness] (1952).
When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, “What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act.” And they do calm down.
De l’inconvénient d’être né [The Trouble with Being Born] (1973).
Tears
Tears do not burn except in solitude.
Sur les cimes du désespoir [On the Heights of Despair] (1934).
. . . my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.
Sur les cimes du désespoir [On the Heights of Despair] (1934).
Thinking
Only those are happy who never think or, rather, who only think about life’s bare necessities, and to think about such things means not to think at all. True thinking resembles a demon who muddies the spring of life or a sickness which corrupts its roots. To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life, to leave behind you, as symbols of your life’s drama, a trail of smoke and blood—all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you.
Sur les cimes du désespoir [On the Heights of Despair] (1934).
The moment we believe we’ve understood everything grants us the look of a murderer.
Syllogismes de l’amertume [Syllogisms of Bitterness] (1952).
The first thinker was, without a doubt, the first man obsessed by why.
De l’inconvénient d’être né [The Trouble with Being Born] (1973).
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
De l’inconvénient d’être né [The Trouble with Being Born] (1973).
Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that we alone pursue the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear.
De l’inconvénient d’être né [The Trouble with Being Born] (1973).
Time and Eternity
Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.
Le livre des leurres [The Book of Delusions] (1936).
Truth
If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.
Des larmes et des saints [Tears and Saints] (1937).
Truths begin by a conflict with the police—and end by calling them in.
Précis de décomposition [Précis of Decomposition] (1949].
We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false.
Écartelèment [Drawn and Quartered] (1983).
Utopia
Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.
Histoire et utopie [History and Utopia] (1960).