The Trouble with Being Born

by Emil M. Cioran

What right have you to pray for me? I need no intercessor, I shall manage alone. The prayers of a wretch I might accept, but no one else’s, not even a saint’s. I cannot bear your bothering about my salvation. If I apprehend salvation and flee it, your prayers are merely an indiscretion. Invest them elsewhere; in any case, we do not serve the same gods. If mine are impotent, there is every reason to believe yours are no less so.

My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding. It is what lets me comprehend Buddha, but also what keeps me from following him.

To look without understanding—that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much. . . .

I have all the defects of other people and yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.

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

A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of his talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.

“Never judge a man without putting yourself in his place.” This old proverb makes all judgment impossible, for we judge someone only because, in fact, we cannot put ourselves in his place.

We should have been excused from lugging a body: the burden of the self was enough.

Children turn, and must turn, against their parents, and the parents can do nothing about it, for they are subject to a law which decrees the relations among all the living: i.e., that each engenders his own enemy.

Every friendship is an inconspicuous drama, a series of subtle wounds.

Fanaticism is the death of conversation. We do not gossip with a candidate for martyrdom. What are we to say to someone who refuses to penetrate our reasons and who, the moment we do not bow to his, would rather die than yield?

My vision of the future is so exact that if I had children, I should strangle them here and now.

All great events have been set in motion by madmen, by mediocre madmen. Which will be true, we may be sure, of the “end of the world” itself.

X maintains we are at the end of a “cosmic cycle” and that soon everything will fall apart. And he does not doubt this for one moment. At the same time, he is the father of a—numerous—family. With certitudes like his, what aberration has deluded him into bringing into a doomed world one child after the next? If we foresee the End, if we are sure it will be coming soon, if we even anticipate it, better to do so alone.

An institution is vital and strong only if it rejects everything which is not itself. Unfortunately the same is true of a nation or of a regime.

The God of the Gospels was less mocking and less jealous, and mortal men did not even enjoy, in their miseries, the consolation of being able to accuse Him.

Years now without coffee, without alcohol, without tobacco. . . . Luckily, there is anxiety, which usefully replaces the strongest stimulants.

Deep inside, each man feels—and believes—himself to be immortal, even if he knows he will perish the next moment. We can understand everything, admit everything, realize everything, except our death, even when we “ponder it unremittingly and even when we are resigned to it.

Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs—something, anything. . .