Emil M.

Cioran - Collected Quotations

I posted this on another forum a while back, but maybe it will be more appreciated here (I'll probably be re-posting many things actually). Anyway: "A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech." "Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there." "Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh." "Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise." "Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves." "Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish." "Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation." "Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off." "It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late." "Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil." "Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness." "No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one." "One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland and no other." "Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors." "Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness." "Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth."

"The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one." "The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself." "The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility." "There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be." "To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer. As soon as they consent to live, the unbeliever and the man of faith are fundamentally the same, since both have made the only decision that defines a being." "To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten." "We derive our vitality from our store of madness." "What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his? " "You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the "mystery" of life." "When you imagine you have reached a certain degree of detachment, you regard as histrionic all zealots ... But doesn't detachment, too, have a histrionics of its own? If actions are mummery, the very refusal of action is one as well. Yet a noble mummery." "The ideally lucid, hence ideally normal, man should have no recourse beyond the nothing that is in him." "Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful ... Let us salute it, then, even celebrate it: our solitude will be reinforced, affirmed. Cut off from one more channel of escape, up against ourselves at last, we are in a better position to inquire as to our functions and our limits, the futility of having a life." "Is it such a great evil not to know how to read and write? In all frankness, I cannot think so. Indeed I will go further and say for certain that when the last illiterate has disappeared from the planet, we may dress in mourning for mankind." "Man, once expelled from paradise, in order not to think about it, in order not to suffer from it, is given in compensation the faculty of will, of aspiring to action, of foundering there with enthusiasm, with brio." "...the very notion of an ideal city is a torment to reason, an enterprise that does honor to the heart and disqualifies the intellect."

"Admiration, by eroding our substance, depresses and ultimately demoralizes us; hence we turn against the admired -- anyone guilty of having inflicted upon us the task of raising ourselves to his level." "Whatever his qualities, a healthy person cannot help but disappoint us." "Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us." "A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed." "No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it." "If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot." "Terror of the future is always grafted onto the desire to experience that terror." "If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out." "This craving to revise our enthusiasms, to change our idols, to pray elsewhere... The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived." "Once you see that everything is unreal, you can't see why you should bother to prove it." "Invalids of hope, we are all still waiting; and life is only the hypostatization of waiting." "By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing; but instead of nonchalantly promenading our own corruption, we exude our sweat and grow winded upon the fetid air." "The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men." "No one can keep his grieves in their prime; they use themselves up. "The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster." "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." "What will be the physiognomy of painting, of poetry, of music, in a hundred years? No one can tell. As after the fall of Athens, of Rome, a long pause will intervene, caused by the exhaustion of consciousness itself. Humanity, to rejoin the past, must invent a second naivet, without which the arts can never begin again."

"This little blind creature, only a few days old, turning its head every which way in search of something or other, this naked skull, this initial baldness, this tiny monkey that has sojourned for months in a latrine and that soon, forgetting its origins, will spit on the galaxies." "Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone." "In certain men, everything, absolutely everything, derives from physiology: their body is their mind, their mind is their body." "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." "According to one Hindu legend, Shiva, at a particular moment, will begin to dance, at first slowly, then faster and faster, and will not stop before having imposed upon the world a frenzied cadence, in every respect opposed to that of Creation. This legend includes no commentary, history having assumed the task of illustrating its obvious truth. " "It is written in the Zohar: "When man appeared thereupon appeared the flowers." I suspect they were there long before him, and that his advent plunged them all into a stupefaction from which they have not yet recovered. " "To stretch out in a field, to smell the earth and tell yourself it is the end as well as the hope of our dejections, that it would be futile to search for anything better to rest on, to dissolve into. . . " "Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough." "Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers." "Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught." "Man is the great deserter of being." "Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have. " "From denial to denial, his existence is diminished: vaguer and more unreal than a syllogism of sighs, how could he still be a creature of flesh and blood? Anemic, he rivals the Idea itself; he has abstracted himself from his ancestors, from his friends, from every soul and himself; in his veins, once turbulent, rests a light from another world. Liberated from what he has lived, unconcerned by what he will live; he demolishes the signposts on all his roads, and wrests himself from the dials of all time. "I shall never meet myself again," he decides, happy to turn his

last hatred against himself, happier still to annihilate--in his forgiveness--all beings, all things." "Our contortions, visible or secret, we communicate to the planet; already it trembles even as we do, it suffers the contagion of our crises and, as this grand mal spreads, it vomits us forth, cursing us the while." "Infatuated by his gifts, ["man"] flouts nature, breaks out of its stagnation, creating a chaos alternately vile and tragic that becomes strictly (and naturally) untenable. That he should clear out as soon as possible is surely nature's wish, and one that man, if he wanted to, could gratify on the spot. Hence nature would be rid of these seditious creatures whose every smile is subversive, of this anti-life force she shelters by force, of this usurper who has stolen her secrets, in order to subjugate and dishonor her." "Cut off from every root, unfit, moreover to mix with dust or mud, we have achieved the feat of breaking not only with the depth of things, but their very surface. " "What life is left him robs him of what reason is left him. Trifles or scourges--the passing of a fly or the cramps of the planet--horrify him equally. With his nerves on fire, he would like the Earth to be made of glass, to shatter it to smithereens; and with what thirst would fling himself toward the stars to reduce them to powder, one by one."

Cioran on Christians: "Imbued with their fits of conscience, the Christians, gratified that another should have suffered for them, loll in the shadow of Calvary. If they sometimes busy themselves retracing its stages, what advantage they manage to derive from doing so! With the look of profiteers, they bloom in church and, when they leave, scarecly dissimulate that smile produced by a certitude gained without fatigue. Grace and a suspect one which spares them from making any effort. Carnival 'redeemed,' braggarts of redemption, sensualists caressed by humility, sin, and hellfire; if they torment their conscience, it is to procure themselves sensations. They procure others by tormenting yours. Once they detect scruple, division or the obsessive presence of a sin or a transgression, they will never let you go, but oblige you to exhibit your agony or advertise your guilt, while they watch like Sadists the spectacle of your confusion. Weep if you can: that is what they are waiting for, impatient to get drunk on your tears, to wallow, charitable and grim, in your humiliations, to feast on your griefs. These men of conviction are so greedy for suspect sensations that they seek them everywhere, and when they no longer find any in the world outside, rush upon themselves. Far from being haunted by the truth, the Christian marvels at his "inner conflicts," at his vices and his virtues, at their power of intoxication, gloats over the Cross and, an Epicurean of the horrible, associates pleasure with sentiments which generally involve nothing of the kind: has he not invented the orgasm of repentance?" On Insomnia: "Whoever said that sleep is the equivalent of hope had a penetrating intuition of the frightening importance not only of sleep but also of insomnia! The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. Why call him a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation

that wants to sleep yet cannot. Sleep is forgetfulness: life's drama, its complications and obsessions vanish completely, and every awakening is a new beginning, a new hope. Life thus maintains a pleasant discontinuity, the illusion of permanent regeneration. Insomnia, on the other hand, gives birth to a feeling of irrevocable sadness, despair, and agony. The healthy manthe animalonly dabbles in insomnia: he knows nothing of those who would give a kingdom for an hour of unconscious sleep, those as terrified by the sight of a bed as they would be of a torture rack. There is a close link between insomnia and despair. The loss of hope comes with the loss of sleep. The difference between paradise and hell: you can always sleep in paradise, never in hell. God punished man by taking away sleep and giving him knowledge. Isn't deprivation of sleep one of the most cruel tortures practiced in prisons? Madmen suffer a lot from insomnia; hence their depressions, their disgust with life, and their suicidal impulses. Isn't the sensation, typical of wakeful hallucinations, of diving into an abyss, a form of madness? Those who commit suicide by throwing themselves from bridges into rivers or from high rooftops onto pavements must be motivated by a blind desire to fall and the dizzying attraction of abysmal depths." On Music: "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." "A passion for music is in itself an avowal. We know more about a stranger who yields himself up to it than about someone who is deaf to music and whom we see every day." "Musical Offering, Art of the Fugue, Goldberg Variations: I love in music, as in philosophy and in everything, what pains by insistence, by recurrence, by that interminable return which reaches the ultimate depths of being and provokes there a barely endurable delectation." On Love: "Love a duel of salivas." On Biography: "I've always asked myself how it is the mere risk of having a biographer doesn't dissuade us from having a life." On Sloth: "I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass--which is better than trying to fill them." On Idealism: "A sensation must have fallen very low to deign to turn into an idea." On Modernity: "Our epoch will be marked by the romanticism of stateless persons." On Dread: "In order to vanquish dread or tenacious anxiety, there is nothing better than to imagine one's own funeral: efficient method, accessible to all. In order to avoid resorting to it during the day, the best is to indulge in its virtues right after getting up. Or perhaps make use of it on special

occasions, similar to Pope Innocent IX who ordered the picture of himself painted on his death-bed. He would cast a glance at his picture every time he had to reach an important decision... " On the Future: "Regardless of what the world will look like in the future, Westerners will assume the role of the Graeculi of the Roman empire. Needed and despised by new conquerors, they will not have anything to offer except the jugglery of their intelligence, or the glitter of their past." "In the future, if mankind is to start all over again, it will be with the outcasts, with the mongols from all parts, with the dregs of the continents." "My vision of the future is that if I had children I would strangle them immediately." On Psychiatry: "In those places where peace, hygiene and leisure ravage, psychoses also multiply... I come from a country which, while never learning to know the meaning of happiness, has also never produced a single psychoanalyst." On the Law: "...authority, not verity, makes the law..." On Society: "Convinced that troubles in our society come from old people, I conceived the plan of liquidating all citizens past their forties--the beginning of sclerosis and mummification. I came to believe that this was the turning point when each human becomes an insult to his nation and a burden to his community... Those who listened to this did not appreciate this discourse and they considered me a cannibal... Must this intent of mine be condemned? It only expresses something which each man, who is attached to his country, desires in the bottom of his heart: liquidation of one half of his compatriots." On Freedom: "To be free is to rid oneself forever from the notion of reward; to expect nothing from people or gods; to renounce not only this world and all worlds, but salvation itself; to break up even the idea of this chain among chains." On Philosophers and Philosophy: "The idea of liberation through the suppression of desire is the greatest foolishness ever conceived by the human mind. Why cut life short, why destroy it for so little profit as total indifference and the illusion of freedom? How dare you speak of life after you have stifled it in yourself? I have more respect for the man with thwarted desires, unhappy and desperate in love, than for the cold and proud philosopher. A world full of philosophers, what a terrifying prospect! They should be all wiped out so that life could go on naturally - blind and irrationally. I hate the wisdom of these men unmoved by truths, who do not suffer with their nerves, their flesh, and their blood. I like only vital, organic truths, the offspring of our anxiety. Those whose

thoughts are alive are always right; there are no arguments against them. And even if there were, they would not last long. I wonder how there can still be men searching for the truth. Do wise men not yet understand that truth cannot be?"