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. Even assuming they are as you imagine them, they would still lack the power to cure me of a horror older than my memory.

What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?

When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.

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

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.

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

Even when they desert hell, men do so only to reconstruct it elsewhere.

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

A serious, honest mind understands—and can understand—nothing of history. History in return is marvelously suited to delight an erudite cynic.

The not at all negligible advantage of having greatly hated men is that one comes to endure them by the exhaustion of this very hatred.

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.

When you live past the age of rebellion, and you still rebel, you seem to yourself a kind of senile Lucifer.