The Trouble with Being Born

by Emil M. Cioran

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.

“By what right do you claim to rule over men and over the universe? Have you suffered for knowledge?” This is the crucial, perhaps the sole question we should ask ourselves when we scrutinize anything, especially a thinker. There is never too great a distinction made between those who have paid for the tiniest step toward knowledge and those, incomparably more numerous, who have received a convenient, indifferent knowledge, a knowledge without ordeals.

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.

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.

We do not envy those who have the capacity to pray, whereas we are filled with envy of the possessors of goods, of those who know wealth and fame. Strange that we resign ourselves to someone’s salvation and not to what fugitive advantages he may enjoy.

No true art without a strong dose of banality. The constant employment of the unaccustomed readily wearies us, nothing being more unendurable than the uniformity of the exceptional.

To be objective is to treat others as you treat an object, a corpse—to behave with them like an undertaker.

The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character—precisely that and nothing but.

“What are you waiting for in order to give up?”—Each sickness sends us a summons disguised as a question. We play deaf, even as we realize that the game is played out and that next time we must have the courage, at last, to capitulate.

The wise man consents to everything, for he identifies himself with nothing. An opportunist without desires.

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.

The interminable is the specialty of the indecisive. They cannot mark life out for their own, and still less their dreams, in which they perpetuate their hesitations, pusillanimities, scruples. They are ideally qualified for nightmare.

We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.

Won over by solitude, yet he remains in the world: a stylite without a pillar.

The stoic’s maxim, according to which we should submit uncomplainingly to things which do not depend on ourselves, takes into account only external misfortunes, which escape our will. But how to accommodate ourselves to those which come from ourselves? If we are the source of our ills, whom are we to confront? Ourselves? We manage, luckily, to forget that we are the guilty parties, and moreover existence is tolerable only if we daily renew this lie, this act of oblivion.

To have any notion of such a success, we must imagine, if we can, a fusion between resignation and ecstasy, between a cold stoic and a disheveled mystic.

Look neither ahead nor behind, look into yourself, with neither fear nor regret. No one descends into himself so long as he remains a slave of the past or of the future.

Appealing, that Hindu notion of entrusting our salvation to someone else, to a chosen “saint,” and permitting him to pray in our place, to do anything in order to save us. Selling our soul to God. . . .

If I have been able to hold out till now, it is because each blow, which seemed intolerable at the time, was followed by a second which was worse, then a third, and so on. If I were in hell, I’d want its circles to multiply, in order to count on a new ordeal, more trying than its predecessor. A salutary policy, with regard to torments at least.

Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying?—that void is consciousness itself.

Moral disintegration when we spend time in a place that is too beautiful: the self dissolves upon contact with paradise. No doubt it was to avoid this danger that the first man made the choice he did.

If you are doomed to devour yourself, nothing can keep you from it: a trifle will impel you as much as a tragedy. Resign yourself to erosion at all times: your fate wills it so.

Lucidity without the corrective of ambition leads to stagnation. It is essential that the one sustain the other, that the one combat the other without winning, for a work, for a life to be possible.

The energy and virulence of my taedium vitae continue to astound me. So much vigor in a disease so decrepit! To this paradox I owe my present incapacity to choose my final hour.

He was above all others, and had had nothing to do with it: he had simply forgotten to desire. . . .

If I were to conform to my most intimate convictions, I should cease to take any action whatever, to react in any way. But I am still capable of sensations. . .

Rare to come upon a free mind, and when you do, you realize that the best of such a mind is not revealed in its works (when we write we bear, mysteriously, chains) but in those confidences where, released from conviction and pose, as from all concern with rigor or standing, it displays its weaknesses. And where it behaves as a heretic to itself.

Everyone has had, at a given moment, an extraordinary experience which will be for him, because of the memory of it he preserves, the crucial obstacle to his inner metamorphosis.

When we are in the depths of depression, everything which feeds it, affords it further substance, also raises it to a level where we can no longer follow and thereby renders it too great, excessive: scarcely surprising that we should reach the point of no longer regarding it as our own.

By attacking and demolishing the gods, philosophy had intended to free men’s minds; in reality, it handed them over to a new servitude, worse than the old one, for the god who was to replace the gods had no particular weakness for either tolerance or irony. Philosophy, it will be objected, is not responsible for the advent of this god, indeed this was not the god philosophy recommended. No doubt, but it should have suspected that we do not subvert the gods with impunity, that others would come to take their place, and that it had nothing to gain by the exchange.

If we see things black, it is because we weigh them in the dark, because thoughts are generally the fruit of sleeplessness, consequently of darkness. They cannot adapt to life because they have not been thought with a view to life. The notion of the consequences they might involve doesn’t even occur to the mind. We are beyond all human calculation, beyond any notion of salvation or perdition, of being or non-being, we are in a particular silence, a superior modality of the void.

To express an obsession is to project it outside yourself, to hunt it down, to exorcise it. Obsessions are the demons of a world without faith.

According to Hegel, man will be completely free only “by surrounding himself with a world entirely created by himself.” But this is precisely what he has done, and man has never been so enchained, so much a slave as now.