The Fall into Time Quotes

“If you try to convert someone, it will never be to
effect his salvation but to make him suffer like yourself,
to be sure he is exposed to the same ordeals and
endures them with the same impatience. You keep
watch, you pray, you agonize-provided he does too,
sighing, groaning, beset by the same tortures that are
racking you. Intolerance is the work of ravaged souls
whose faith comes down to a more or less deliberate
torment they would like to see generalized, instituted.
The happiness of others never having been a motive
or principle of action, it is invoked only to appease
conscience or to parade noble excuses: whenever we
determine upon an action, the impulse leading to it
and forcing us to complete it is almost always inadmissible.
No one saves anyone; for we save only ourselves,
and do so all the better if we disguise as
convictions the misery we want to share, to lavish on
others. However glamorous its appearances, proselytism
nonetheless derives from a suspect generosity,
worse in its effects than a patent aggression. No one
is willing to endure alone the discipline he may even
have assented to, nor the yoke he has shouldered.
Vindication reverberates beneath the missionary's
bonhomie, the apostle's joy. We convert not to liberate
but to enchain.
Once someone is shackled by a certainty, he envies
your vague opinions, your resistance to dogmas or
slogans, your blissful incapacity to commit yourself.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Fall into Time

“What I discern in each moment is its exhaustion, its death-rattle, and not the transition to the next moment. I generate dead time, wallowing in the asphyxia of becoming.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Fall into Time

“Croire qu’il lui appartient de dépasser sa condition et de s’orienter vers celle de surhomme, c’est oublier qu’il a du mal à tenir le coup en tant qu’homme, et qu’il n’y parvient qu’à force de tendre sa volonté, son ressort, au maximum.”
― Emil Cioran, The Fall into Time

“If man is not ready to abdicate or to reconsider his case, it is because he has not yet drawn the final consequences of knowledge and of power. Convinced that his moment will come, that he will catch up with God and pass Him by, he clings—envious as he is—to the notion of evolution, as if the fact of advancing must necessarily bring him to the highest degree of perfection. Having sought to be other, he will end by being nothing; he is already nothing. Doubtless he is evolving, but against himself, to his cost, and toward a complexity which is ruining him. Becoming, progress: notions apparently tangential, actually divergent. True, everything changes, but rarely, if ever, for the better. Euphoric inflection of the original disease, of that false innocence which awakened in Adam a desire for the new, our faith in evolution, in the identity of becoming and progress, will collapse only when man, having reached the extremity of his distraction, having turned at last to the knowledge which leads to deliverance and not to power, will be in a position to offer an irrevocable no to his exploits and to his work. If he continues to clutch at them, he will doubtless enter upon the career of a ludicrous god or an obsolete animal, a solution as convenient as it is degrading, the ultimate stage of his infidelity to himself. Whatever choice he makes, and though he has not exhausted all the virtues of his failure, he has nonetheless fallen so low that it is hard to understand why he does not pray unceasingly, until his very voice and reason are extinguished.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Fall into Time

“And if Indifference fills him to overflowing, if he makes it into a reality as vast as the universe itself, it is because Indifference is the practical equivalent of doubt, and in his eyes does doubt not have the prestige of the Unconditioned?”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Fall into Time

“A religion is nothing by itself; its fate depends on those who adopt it. The new gods demand new men, capable, in any circumstance, of decision, of choice, of saying firmly yes or no, instead of floundering in quibbles or becoming anemic by abuse of nuance. Since the virtues of barbarians consist precisely in the power of taking sides, of affirming or denying, they will always be celebrated by declining periods. The nostalgia for barbarism is the last word of a civilization; and thereby of skepticism.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Fall into Time

“A civilization begins by myth and ends in doubt; a theoretical doubt which, once it turns against itself, becomes quite practical. No civilization can begin by questioning values it has not yet created; once produced, it wearies of them and weans itself away, examines and weighs them with a devastating detachment.
For the various beliefs it had engendered and which now break adrift, it substitutes a system of uncertainties, it organizes its metaphysical shipwreck with amazing success when a Sextus is on hand to help.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Fall into Time

“Man defies and denies the gods, though still acknowledging their quality as ghosts; once cast out from time, he will be so far from them that he will no longer even retain the idea of gods. And it is as a punishment for forgetting them that he will then experience his complete downfall. A man who seeks to be more than he is will not fail to be less. The disequilibrium of tension will sooner or later yield to that of slackness and abandonment. Once we have posited this symmetry, we must take the next step and acknowledge that there is a certain mystery in downfall. For example, the fallen man has nothing to do with the failure; rather he suggests the notion of someone supernaturally stricken, as if some baleful power had beset him and taken possession of his faculties The spectacle of downfall prevails over that of death: all beings die; only man has the vocation to fall. He is on a precipice overhanging life (as life, indeed, overhangs matter). The farther from life he moves, whether up or down, the closer he comes to his ruin. Whether he transfigures or disfigures himself, in either case he loses his way. And we must add that he cannot avoid this loss without short-changing his destiny.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Fall into Time

“Doubt crashes down upon us like a calamity; far from choosing it, we fall into it. And try as we will to wrest ourselves from it, to conjure it away, doubt never loses sight of us, for it is not even true that doubt crashes down upon us, doubt was within us, and we were foredoomed to it. No one chooses the lack of choice nor strives to opt for the absence of option, for nothing that affects us deeply is willed.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Fall into Time

“Zadarnic supunem universul și ni-l însușim, atâta vreme cât nu vom fi învins timpul vom rămâne doar niște sclavi.”
― Emil Cioran, The Fall into Time