The Trouble with Being Born

by Emil M. Cioran

Here on the coast of Normandy, at this hour of the morning, I needed no one. The very gulls’ presence bothered me: I drove them off with stones. And hearing their supernatural shrieks, I realized that that was just what I wanted, that only the Sinister could soothe me, and that it was for such a confrontation that I had got up before dawn.

The farther men get from God, the farther they advance into the knowledge of religions.

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

Explosive force of any mortification. Every vanquished desire affords us power. We have the more hold over this world the further we withdraw from it, the less we adhere to it. Renunciation confers an infinite power.

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.

Every form of haste, even toward the good, betrays some mental disorder.

If it is characteristic of the wise man to do nothing useless, no one will surpass me in wisdom: I do not even lower myself to useful things.

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

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

Why does the Gita rank “renunciation of the fruit of actions” so high? Because such renunciation is rare, impracticable, contrary to our nature, and because achieving it is destroying the man one has been and one is, killing in oneself the entire past, the work of millennia—in a word, freeing oneself of the Species, that hideous and immemorial riffraff.

The future appeals to you? All yours! Myself I prefer to keep to the incredible present and the incredible past. I leave it to you to face the Incredible itself.

The sage is a pacified, withdrawn destroyer. The others are destroyers in practice.

Tom between violence and disillusionment, I seem to myself a terrorist who, going out in the street to perpetrate some outrage, stops on the way to consult Ecclesiastes or Epictetus.

We invoke “progress” less and less and “mutation” more and more, and all that we allege to illustrate the latter’s advantages is merely one symptom after another of an unrivaled catastrophe.

In anxiety, a man clings to whatever can reinforce, can stimulate his providential discomfort: to try to cure him of it is to destroy his equilibrium, anxiety being the basis of his existence and his prosperity. The cunning confessor knows it is necessary, knows that we cannot do without anxiety once we have known it. Since he dares not proclaim its benefits, he employs a detour—he vaunts remorse, an admitted, an honorable anxiety. His customers are grateful; hence he manages to keep them readily enough, whereas his lay colleagues struggle and grovel to keep theirs.

“To hell with everything”—if these words have been uttered, even only once, coldly, with complete awareness of what they mean, history is justified and, with it, all of us.

I shall no longer read the sages—they have done me too much harm. I should have surrendered to my instincts, let my madness flourish. I have done just the opposite, I have put on the mask of reason, and the mask has ended by replacing my face and usurping all the rest.