Status Updates From On the Heights of Despair

Women are safe on the spiritual plane because in them the dualism between life and the spirit is less intense than in men. A graceful sense of existence does not lead to metaphysical revelations, to a vision of truth, to the sense of an ending which poisons every moment of life.

Come on Cioran ! 🙃😑

There are men who started in the world of abstract forms and ended in absolute confusion. Therefore they can only philosophize poetically.

There are only two fundamental attitudes: the naive and the heroic. All the others partake of them. One must choose between these two in order to avoid idiocy. But for the man who has come to make such a choice, innocence is no longer an option, so there remains only heroism.

I know why I am sad, but I do not know why I am melancholy.

Nobody who does not love chaos is a creator, and whoever is contemptuous of illness must not speak of the spirit.

El hombre tiende constantemente a arrogarse el monopolio del drama y del sufrimiento

One must descend all the circles of an inner hell to turn one’s destiny into a subjective yet universal problem. If you are not burned to ashes, you will then be able to philosophize lyrically.

You do not gain explicit certainty or definite knowledge by it ( ecstasy) ; yet the feeling of essential participation is so intense that it surpasses all limits and categories of common knowledge. A gate opens from this world of toil, pain, and suffering to the inner sanctum of life, where we apprehend a most simple vision in a glorious metaphysical trance.

At the end of all melancholy there is a chance of consolation or resignation. Its esthetic aspect holds possibilities for future harmony which are absent from profound organic sadness. The latter ends in the irrevocable, the former in graceful dream.

On summer afternoons haven’t you experienced that sensation of strange pleasure when you abandon yourself to the senses without any special thought and when intimations of serene eternity bring an unusual peace to your soul? It is as if all worldly worries and all spiritual doubts grow dumb in front of a display of overwhelming beauty, whose seductions render all questions superfluous.

Man grows wings in melancholy not in order to enjoy the world but in order to be alone.

One should not forget that philosophy is the art of masking inner torments.