The Trouble with Being Born

by Emil M. Cioran

We dismiss the skeptic, we speak of an “automatism of doubt,” while we never say of a believer that he has fallen into an “automatism of faith.” Yet faith is much more mechanical than doubt, which has the excuse of proceeding from surprise to surprise—inside perplexity, it is true.

It is because of speech that men give the illusion of being free. If they did—without a word—what they do, we would take them for robots. By speaking, they deceive themselves, as they deceive others: because they say what they are going to do, who could suspect they are not masters of their actions?

When you know yourself well and do not despise yourself utterly, it is because you are too exhausted to indulge in extreme feelings.

An impostor, a “humbug,” conscious of being so and therefore a self-spectator, is necessarily more advanced in knowledge than a steady mind full of merits and all of a piece.

Supremacy of regret: the actions we have not performed constitute, by the very fact that they pursue us and that we continually think about them, the sole contents of our consciousness.

In art and in everything, the commentator is generally better informed and more lucid than the subject of commentary. This is the advantage the murderer has over his victim.

“. . . the feeling of being everything and the evidence of being nothing.”

The mystics and their “collected works.” When one addresses oneself to God, and to God alone, as they claim to do, one should be careful not to write. God doesn’t read.

The appetite for torment is for some what the lure of gain is for others.

Lucidity does not extirpate the desire to live—far from it, lucidity merely makes us unsuited to life.

God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.

Any success, in any realm, involves an inner impoverishment. It makes us forget what we are, it deprives us of the torment of our limits.

The pangs of truth about ourselves are more than we can endure. How pitiable the man (if such a being exists) who no longer lies to himself!

If we hope to see the number of our disappointments or our frenzies diminish, then on every occasion we must remember that we are here to make each other wretched, and that to rebel against this state of affairs is to undermine the very foundations of communal life. §

The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.

The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.

To manifest oneself, to produce in any realm is the characteristic of a more or less camouflaged fanatic. If we do not regard ourselves as entrusted with a mission, existence is difficult; action, impossible.

We should establish a religion’s degree of truth according to what it makes of the Devil: the more eminent the rank it accords him, the more it testifies that it is concerned with reality, that it rejects deceit and lies, that it is serious, that it sets more store by verification than by distraction or consolation.