The Trouble with Being Born

by Emil M. Cioran

“reality” falls within the province of lunacy.

What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: “If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world. . . .” And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.

We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job . . .

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,

Some have misfortunes; others, obsessions. Which are worse off?

Thought is never innocent, for it is pitiless, it is aggressive, it helps us burst our bonds.

The surest way of not being deceived is to undermine one certainty after the next.

Though we may prefer ourselves to the universe, we nonetheless loathe ourselves much more than we suspect. If the wise man is so rare a phenomenon, it is because he seems unshaken by the aversion which, like all beings, he must feel for himself.

This is how we recognize the man who has tendencies toward an inner quest: he will set failure above any success, he will even seek it out, unconsciously of course. This is because failure, always essential, reveals us to ourselves, permits us to see ourselves as God sees us, whereas success distances us from what is most inward in ourselves and indeed in everything.

In certain men, everything, absolutely everything, derives from physiology: their body is their mind, their mind is their body.

The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don’t know what that elsewhere is.

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

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

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on.

The only successful philosophies and religions are the ones that flatter us, whether in the name of progress or of hell. Damned or not, man experiences an absolute need to be at the heart of everything.

If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?

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.

If, in her Foundations, Teresa of Avila lingers over the subject of melancholia, it is because she recognizes it as incurable. Physicians, she says, cannot deal with it, and the mother superior of a convent, faced with such sufferers, has but one recourse: to inspire them with the dread of authority, to threaten them, to frighten them. The saint’s method remains the best: only kicks, slaps, and a good beating will be effective in the case of a “depressive.” Moreover, such treatment is precisely what the “depressive” himself resorts to when he decides to end it all: he merely employs more thorough means.

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

The last whose disloyalty we forgive are those we have disappointed.

As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.

We forgive only madmen and children for being frank with us: others, if they have the audacity to imitate them, will regret it sooner or later.

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.

As long as God had him in tow, man advanced slowly, so slowly he did not even realize it. Now that he no longer lives in anyone’s shadow, he is in a rush, and deplores it—he would give anything to regain the old cadence.

Vain people are almost always annoying, but they make an effort, they take the trouble: they are bores who don’t want to be bores, and we are grateful to them for that: we end by enduring them, even by seeking them out.

Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.

Failure, even repeated, always seems fresh; whereas success, multiplied, loses all interest, all attraction. It is not misfortune but happiness—insolent happiness, it is true—which leads to rancor and sarcasm.

A free man is one who has discerned the inanity of all points of view; a liberated man is one who has drawn the consequences of such discernment.

Whenever a man converts to something, anything, we envy him at first, then we pity him, after which we despise him.

Why fear the nothing in store for us when it is no different from the nothing which preceded us: this argument of the Ancients against the fear of death is unacceptable as consolation. Before, we had the luck not to exist; now we exist, and it is this particle of existence, hence of misfortune, which dreads death. Particle is not the word, since each of us prefers himself to the universe, at any rate considers himself equal to it. §

We cannot forgive those we have praised to the skies, we are impatient to break with them, to snap the most delicate chain of all: the chain of admiration . . . , not out of insolence, but out of an aspiration to find our bearings, to be free, to be . . . ourselves. Which we manage only by an act of injustice.

No autocrat wields a power comparable to that enjoyed by a poor devil planning to kill himself.

Over the centuries, man has slaved to believe, passing from dogma to dogma, illusion to illusion, and has given very little time to doubts, short intervals between his epochs of blindness. Indeed they were not doubts but pauses, moments of respite following the fatigue of faith, of any faith.

I know peace only when my ambitions sleep. Once they waken, anxiety repossesses me. Life is a state of ambition. The mole digging his tunnels is ambitious. Ambition is in effect everywhere, and we see its traces on the faces of the dead themselves.

If you want to know a nation, frequent its second-order writers: they alone reflect its true nature. The others denounce or transfigure the nullity of their compatriots, and neither can nor will put themselves on the same level. They are suspect witnesses.

I shall never utterly admire anyone except a man dishonored—and happy. There is a man, I should say, who defies the opinion of his fellows and who finds consolation and happiness in himself alone.

“He who is inclined to lust is merciful and tender-hearted; those who are inclined to purity are not so” (Saint John Climacus). It took a saint, neither more nor less, to denounce so distinctly and so vigorously not the lies but the very essence of Christian morality, and indeed of all morality.

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.

Prosperous societies are far more fragile than the others, since it remains for them to achieve only their own ruin, comfort not being an ideal when we possess it, still less of one when it has been around for generations.

Rising nations fear above all the absence of prejudices and prohibitions, the intellectual shamelessness which constitutes the allure of declining civilizations.

A society is doomed when it no longer has the force to be limited. How, with an open mind—too open—can it protect itself against the excesses, the mortal risks of freedom?

If humanity has such love for saviors, those fanatics who so shamelessly believe in themselves, it is because humanity supposes they believe in it.

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.

What distinguishes the true prophet from the rest is that he stands at the origin of movements and doctrines which exclude and oppose each other.

In a metropolis as in a hamlet, what we still love best is to watch the fall of one of our kind.

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.

If everyone had seen through everything, if everyone had “understood,” history would have ceased long since. But we are fundamentally, biologically unsuited to “understand.” And even if everyone understood except for one, history would be perpetuated because of that one, because of his blindness. Because of a single illusion!

Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.

In his Ladder of Paradise, Saint John Climacus notes that a proud monk has no need to be persecuted by the Devil—he is himself his own devil.