The Trouble with Being Born

by Emil M. Cioran

“It’s already in the past,” he says about all he achieves, even as he achieves it, thereby forever destitute of the present.

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.

True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.

We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves.

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.

As the years accumulate, we form an increasingly somber image of the future. Is this only to console ourselves for being excluded from it? Yes in appearance, no in fact, for the future has always been hideous, man being able to remedy his evils only by aggravating them, so that in each epoch existence is much more tolerable before the solution is found to the difficulties of the moment.

Regarding death, I ceaselessly waver between “mystery” and “inconsequentiality”—between the Pyramids and the Morgue.

To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression.

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

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

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

Damned or not, man experiences an absolute need to be at the heart of everything.

“What do you do from morning to night?” “I endure myself.”

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.

Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that he alone pursues the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear.

Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.

The older I grow, the less I react to frenzy, delirium.

If, as we grow older, we scrutinize our own past at the expense of “problems,” it is simply because we handle memories more readily than ideas.

However disabused one may be, it is impossible to live without any hope at all. We always keep one, unwittingly, and this unconscious hope makes up for all the explicit others we have rejected, exhausted.

We are enriched only by frequenting disciplines remote from our own.

“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.

If only I could reach the level of the man I would have liked to be!

Anxiety is not provoked: it tries to find a justification for itself, and in order to do so seizes upon anything, the vilest pretexts, to which it clings once it has invented them.

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 task to be done, something I have undertaken out of necessity or choice: no sooner have I started in than everything seems important, everything attracts me, except that. §

The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.

The dissolving power of conversation. One realizes why both meditation and action require silence.

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.

We should have abided by our larval condition, dispensed with evolution, remained incomplete, delighting in the elemental siesta and calmly consuming ourselves in an embryonic ecstasy.

For the victim of anxiety, there is no difference between success and fiasco. His reaction to the one is the same as to the other: both trouble him equally.

My burden is sufficient, I no longer can carry that of others as well.

We should repeat to ourselves, every day: I am one of the billions dragging himself across the earth’s surface. One, and no more.

Each generation lives in the absolute: it behaves as if it had reached the apex if not the end of history.

Any and every nation, at a certain moment of its career, considers itself chosen. It is at this moment that it gives the best and the worst of itself.

The white race increasingly deserves the name given by the American Indians: palefaces.

We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

Strictly speaking, history does not repeat itself, but since the illusions man is capable of are limited in number, they always return in another disguise, thereby giving some ultradecrepit filth a look of novelty and a tragic glaze.

When we have committed the folly of confiding a secret to someone, the only way of being sure he will keep it to himself is to kill him on the spot.

It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.

Since he is as ignorant as his hearers of what he wants to say or what he wants, he can go on for hours without exhausting the amazement of the puppets listening to him.

Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal—less “for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.

My merit is not to be totally ineffectual but to have wanted to be.

This body, once loyal, disavows me, no longer follows me, has ceased to be my accomplice. Rejected, betrayed, discarded, what would become of me if old infirmities, to prove their allegiance, didn’t come to keep me company at every hour of the day and night?

Trees are massacred, houses go up—faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.

I should have surrendered to my instincts, let my madness flourish.

When you no longer believe in yourself, you stop producing or struggling, you even stop raising questions or answering them, whereas it is the contrary which should have occurred, since it is precisely at this moment that, being free of all bonds, you are likely to grasp the truth, discern what is real and what is not.