Cioran Book Quotes

A book is a suicide postponed.

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

Read day and night, devour books—these sleeping pills—not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.

-To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously.

Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.

A book should open old wounds, even inflict new ones. A book should be a danger.

Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection.

There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books.

Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be. — Emil Cioran, The Book of Delusions (‎ Humanitas, January 1, 1991) Originally publishedJanuary 1, 1936,

My memories, with images by Botticelli and harmonies by Mozart, of returning from a far away place, of the time when my tears were acts of worshiping the sun… All these melancholies awaken my angelic places of the past, solitary and silent scenery, the scenery of grand recollections and grand forgetfulness; all my melancholies bring my distances closer to one another; they ravish deeply all the springs of my childhood and bring to light the uncertainty of some distant memory or a regret about a world whose tears are like mirrors of the soul. Melancholic confessions: they are the only proof of the lost paradise.

What makes bad poets worse is that they read only poets (just as bad philosophers read only philosophers), whereas they would benefit much more from a book of botany or geology. We are enriched only by frequenting disciplines remote from our own. This is true, of course, only for realms where the ego is rampant.

The book which, after demolishing everything, fails to demolish itself will have exasperated us to no purpose.

A book should open old wounds, even inflict new ones. A book should be a danger.

In any book governed by the Fragment, truths and whims keep company throughout.

What makes bad poets worse is that they read only poets (just as bad philosophers read only philosophers), whereas they would benefit much more from a book of botany or geology. We are enriched only by frequenting disciplines remote from our own. This is true, of course, only for realms where the ego is rampant, §

The tired intellectual sums up the deformities and the vices of a world adrift. He does not act, he suffers; if he favors the notion of tolerance, he does not find in it the stimulant he needs. Tyranny furnishes that, as do the doctrines of which it is the outcome. If he is the first of its victims, he will not complain: only the strength that grinds him into the dust seduces him. To want to be free is to want to be oneself; but he is tired of being himself, of blazing a trail into uncertainty, of stumbling through truths. “Bind me with the chains of Illusion,” he sighs, even as he says farewell to the peregrinations of Knowledge. Thus he will fling himself, eyes closed, into any mythology which will assure him the protection and the peace of the yoke. Declining the honor of assuming his own anxieties, he will engage in enterprises from which he anticipates sensations he could not derive from himself, so that the excesses of his lassitude will confirm the tyrannies. Churches, ideologies, police—seek out their origin in the horror he feels for his own lucidity, rather than in the stupidity of the masses. This weakling transforms himself, in the name of a know-nothing utopia, into a gravedigger of the intellect; convinced of doing something useful, he prostitutes Pascal’s old “abêtissezvous,” the Solitary’s tragic device. A routed iconoclast, disillusioned with paradox and provocation, in search of impersonality and routine, half prostrated, ripe for the stereotype, the tired intellectual abdicates his singularity and rejoins the rabble. Nothing more to overturn, if not himself: the last idol to smash … His own debris lures him on. While he contemplates it, he shapes the idol of new gods or restores the old ones by baptizing them with new names. Unable to sustain the dignity of being fastidious, less and less inclined to winnow truths, he is content with those he is offered. By-product of his ego, he proceeds—a wrecker gone to seed—to crawl before the altars, or before what takes their place. In the temple or on the tribunal, his place is where there is singing, or shouting—no longer a chance to hear one’s own voice. A parody of belief? It matters little to him, since all he aspires to is to desist from himself. All his philosophy has concluded in a refrain, all his pride foundered on a Hosanna! Let us be fair: as things stand now, what else could he do? Europe’s charm, her originality resided in the acuity of her critical spirit, in her militant, aggressive skepticism; this skepticism has had its day. Hence the intellectual, frustrated in his doubts, seeks out the compensations of dogma. Having reached the confines of analysis, struck down by the void he discovers there, he turns on his heel and attempts to seize the first certainty to come along; but he lacks the naiveté to hold onto it; henceforth, a fanatic without convictions, he is no more than an ideologist, a hybrid thinker, such as we find in all transitional periods. Participating in two different styles, he is, by the form of his intelligence, a tributary of the one of the one which is vanishing, and by the ideas he defends, of the one which is appearing. To understand him better, let us imagine an Augustine half-converted, drifting and tacking, and borrowing from Christianity only its hatred of the ancient world. Are we not in a period symmetrical with the one which saw the birth of The City of God? It is difficult to conceive of a book more timely. Today as then, men’s minds need a simple truth, an answer which delivers them from their questions, a gospel, a tomb.

Penetrating the literary inferno, you will come to learn its artifices and its arsenic; shielded from the immediate, that caricature of yourself, you will no longer have any but formal experiences, indirect experiences; you will vanish into the Word. Books will be the sole object of your discussions. As for literary people, you will derive no benefit from them. But you will find this out too late, after having wasted your best years in a milieu without density or substance. The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty - the sideshow of second-thoughts - is his rule; he offers himself. Every form of talent involves a certain shamelessness. Only sterility is truly distinguished - the man who effaces himself along with his secret, because he disdains to parade it: sentiments expressed are an agony for irony, a slap at humor. To keep one's secret is the most fruitful of activities. It torments, erodes, threatens you. Even when confession is addressed to God, it is an outrage against ourselves, against the mainspring of our being. The apprehensions, shames, fears from which both religious and profane therapeutics would deliver us constitute a patrimony we should not allow ourselves to be dispossessed of, at any cost. We must defend ourselves against our healers and, even if we die for it, preserve our sickness and our sins. The confessional? a rape of conscience perpetrated in the name of heaven. And that other rape, psychological analysis! Secularized, prostituted, the confessional will soon be installed on our street corners: except for a couple of criminals, everyone aspires to have a public soul, a poster soul.

If there were captions explaining their history next to these dedications they would be proof of the richness of relationships in Panikkar’s life and of how my collection came from many directions. In order to sing my glories, I will select names of several famous authors who gave their books with dedications to Panikkar and to me: Francesco Alberoni, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Bettina Baümer, Massimo Cacciari, Enrico Castelli, Emil Cioran, Victoria Cirlot, Oscar Cullman, Jacques Albert Cuttat, Henri e Lubac, Mircea Eliade, Jean Guitton, Alois Maria Haas, Martin Heidegger, Johannes Kakichi Kadowaki, Károly Kerényi, Ursula King, Serge Latouche, Javier Meloni, Salvador Pániker, Octavio Paz, Emanuele Severino, Raniero La Valle, Amador Vega, Uma Marina Vesci,

So what! He exists. If he had given birth to books, if he had had the misfortune to ‘realize’ himself, we wouldn’t have been talking about him the last hour.

To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall? To publish one’s taints in order to amuse or exasperate!

The intrinsic value of a book does not depend on the importance of its subject (else the theologians would prevail, and mightily), but on the manner of approaching the accidental and the insignificant, of mastering the infinitesimal. The essential has never required the least talent.

In this compartment, a hideous woman sitting oppo-site, snoring, mouth open: an obscene agony. What was to be done? How endure such a spectacle? Stalin came to my aid. In his youth, passing between two rows of cos-sacks who were whipping him, he utterly concentrated upon reading a book, so that his consciousness of the blows was completely diverted. Strengthened by this ex-ample, I too plunged into my book, and halted at each word with extreme application till the moment the monster ended her agony.

In this compartment, a hideous woman sitting opposite, snoring, mouth open: an obscene agony. What was to be done? How endure such a spectacle? Stalin came to my aid. In his youth, passing between two rows of cossacks who were whipping him, he utterly concentrated upon reading a book, so that his consciousness of the blows was completely diverted. Strengthened by this example, I too plunged into my book, and halted at each word with extreme application till the moment the monster ended her agony.

I was reading in anticipation of a similar telegram, with dishwater co ee served before me. I hallucinated about the telegram lying unread at my table. I conjured up and feared my absence from my mother’s funeral. When a loved one is incommunicado, ction takes over our lives and here I was, shunting so frequently between past and present, I seemed to be exhuming my future from it. ‘A book is a suicide postponed,’ the philosopher Emil Cioran once said. Reading books (including the depressing ones) has helped me postpone mine.

Each book deals relentlessly with themes of illness, death and suicide. It was a rather touching irony that the author lived to the ripe old age of 84. By the time Cioran died in 1995, he had become a cult in France, attracting the sort of faddish attention he witheringly denounced in his work. Every life, he maintained, is utterly peculiar – and wholly unimportant. In the age of Walt Disney, this kind of darkness matters. Cioran’s writing belongs in the line of those great aloof European miserabilists, including La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, Leopardi, Nietzsche and Beckett. Like them, he saw civilization as an absurd distraction from the ultimate meaninglessness of existence. ‘Only an idiot could think there is a point to any of this,’ he insisted. But he always kept his wit and good cheer.