Cioran The Trouble With Being Born Quotes

It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself.

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 where that elsewhere is.

Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.

When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, “What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act.” And they do calm down.

To have committed every crime but that of being a father.

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.

To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.

I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.

Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.

This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this, and I do not. Everything is unique—and insignificant.

Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs — something, anything.... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose dying: Everything!

There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.

I have all the defects of other people and yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.

I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.

If I used to ask myself, over a coffin: “What good did it do the occupant to be born?”, I now put the same question about anyone alive.

Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do. One so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it.

I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.

To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!

If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.

I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass—which is better than trying to fill them.

If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.

I am for the most part so convinced that everything is lacking in basis, consequence, justification, that if someone dared to contradict me, even the man I most admire, he would seem to me a charlatan or a fool.

I long to be free—desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.

At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.

What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?

Nothing is better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.

Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.

Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.

I think of so many people who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death.

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.

Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.

He detested objective truths, the burden of argument, sustained reasoning. He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one. Others are a dialectician’s invention.

My vision of the future is so exact that if I had children, I should strangle them here and now.

To be objective is to treat others as you treat an object, a corpse—to behave with them like an undertaker.

I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.

The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity …

It has been a long time since philosophers have read men’s souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.

I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if, creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity. Yet in a less assured mood, birth seems a calamity I would be miserable not having known.

For a long while I have lived with the notion that I was the most normal being that ever existed. This notion gave me the taste, even the passion for being unproductive: what was the use of being prized in a world inhabited by madmen, a world mired in mania and stupidity? For whom was one to bother, and to what end? It remains to be seen if I have quite freed myself from this certitude, salvation in the absolute, ruin in the immediate.

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.

Man accepts death but not the hour of his death. To die any time, except when one has to die!

The real, the unique misfortune: to see the light of day. A disaster which dates back to aggressiveness, to the seed of expansion and rage within origins, to the tendency to the worst which first shook them up.

We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good—have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us. 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.

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?

Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.

For a long time—always, in fact—I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn’t able to deal with it; for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.

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.

No one has lived so close to his skeleton as I have lived to mine: from which results an endless dialogue and certain truths which I manage neither to accept nor to reject.

I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.

A conscious fruit fly would have to confront exactly the same difficulties, the same kind of insoluble problems as man.

Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what’s the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?

Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught. Both theses are equally well-founded, hence equally true, as each of us can discover for himself in the space of an hour, sometimes of a minute. …

In Buddhist writings, mention is often made of “the abyss of birth." An abyss indeed, a gulf into which we do not fall but from which, instead, we emerge, to our universal chagrin.

What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know what that elsewhere is.

Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that he alone pursues the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear.

Ever since I was born”—that since has a resonance so dreadful to my ears it becomes unendurable.

Time, fertile in resources, more inventive and more charitable than we think, possesses a remarkable capacity to help us out, to afford us at any hour of the day some new humiliation.

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.

What do you do from morning to night?” “I endure myself.

In the days when I set off on month-long bicycle trips across France, my greatest pleasure was to stop in country cemeteries, to stretch out between two graves, and to smoke for hours on end. I think of those days as the most active period of my life.

We tell our troubles to someone only to make him suffer, to make him assume them for himself. If we wanted to win him over, we would admit none but abstract worries, the only kind those who love us are eager to hear.

My disappointments, instead of converging toward a center and constituting if not a system at least an ensemble, are scattered, each supposed itself unique and thereby wasted, lacking organization.

A remark of my brother’s apropos of the troubles and pains our mother endured: “Old age is nature’s self-criticism.

Dacă-mi place atîta corespondenţa lui Dostoievski e pentru că acolo nu e vorba decît de boală şi de bani, unice subiecte <>. Tot restul nu e decît înflorituri şi talmeş-balmeş.

Extraordinary and null—these two adjectives apply to the sexual act, and, consequently, to everything resulting from it, to life first of all.

An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.

He who hates himself is not humble.

The problem of responsibility would have a meaning only if we had been consulted before our birth and had consented to be precisely who we are.

In permitting man, Nature has committed much more than a mistake in her calculations: a crime against herself.

We must side with the oppressed on every occasion, even when they are in the wrong, though without losing sight of the fact that they are molded of the same clay as their oppressors.

We had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy.

Even in childhood I watched the hours flow, independent of any reference, any action, any event, the disjunction of time from what was not itself, its autonomous existence, its special status, its empire, its tyranny. I remember quite clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts. Time was coming unstuck from being—at my expense.

Explosive force of any mortification. Every vanquished desire affords us power. We have the more hold over this world the further we withdraw from it, the less we adhere to it. Renunciation confers an infinite power.

If it is true that by death we once more become what we were before being, would it not have been better to abide by that pure possibility, not to stir from it? What use was this detour, when we might have remained forever in an unrealized plenitude?

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 somewhere else, and I don’t know what that elsewhere is.

Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one's reach.

The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.

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.

Unlike Job, I have not cursed the day I was born; all the other days, on the contrary, I have covered with my anathemas. …

Only false values prevail, because everyone can assimilate them, counterfeit them (false thereby to the second degree). An idea that succeeds is necessarily a pseudo-idea.

Everyone has had, at a given moment, an extraordinary experience which will be for him, because of the memory of it he preserves, the crucial obstacle to his inner metamorphosis.

أن تقتل نفسك لأنك ما أنت عليه، نعم، لكن ليس لأن البشرية كلها تبصق في وجهك.

Years now without coffee, without alcohol, without tobacco. ...Luckily, there is anxiety, which usefully replaces the strongest stimulants.

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.

القلق ليس بمستفز، أنه يبحث لنفسه عن مُبرر ليستولي على كل شيء، ممتطياً أتفه الذرائع، ليبقى ثابتاً حين يبدلها. في الواقع الذي يسبق تعبيراته الخاصة، محدداته، يحفز القلق نفسه، يُوَلدّ نفسه، إنه "خلق لانهائي"، وعلى هذا النحو من المُستحسن الإشارة إلى أعمال اللاهوتيين أكثر من العقلانيين.

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 do do? where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.

Am trăit întotdeauna cu conştiinţa neputinţei de a trăi. Şi ceea ce mi-a făcut existenţa suportabilă e curiozitatea de a vedea cum aveam să trec de la un minut, de la o zi, de la un an la altul.

If only we could reach back before the concept, could write on a level with the senses, record the infinitesimal variations of what we touch, do what a reptile would do if it were to set about writing!

Meditate but one hour upon the self’s nonexistence and you will feel yourself to be another man,” said a priest of the Japanese Kusha sect to a Western visitor. Without having frequented the Buddhist monasteries, how many times have I not lingered over the world’s unreality, and hence my own? I have not become another man for that, no, but there certainly has remained with me the feeling that my identity is entirely illusory, and that by losing it I have lost nothing, except something, except everything.

We say: he has no talent, only tone. But tone is precisely what cannot be invented—we’re born with it. Tone is an inherited grace, the privilege some of us have of making our organic pulsations felt—tone is more than talent, it is its essence.

Every phenomenon is a corrupt version of another, larger phenomenon: time, a disease of eternity; history, a disease of time; life, again, a disease of matter. Then what is normal, what is healthy? Eternity? Which itself is only an infirmity of God.

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

All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression “metaphysical exile” had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.

Characteristic of sickness to stay awake when everything sleeps, when everything is at rest, even the sick man.

Unmaking, decreating, is the only task man may take upon himself, if he aspires, as everything suggests, to distinguish himself from the Creator.

I dream of an ideal confessor to tell everything to, spill it all: I dream of a blasé saint.

When the habit of seeing things as they are turns into a mania, we lament the madman we have been and are no longer.

لو استطعنا أن نرانا بعيون الآخرين لاختفينا علي الفور.

أشعر بأني حر لكني أعرف أني لست كذلك.

كلما عشنا أكثر اكتشفنا أنه لم يكن من المجدي أن نعيش.

My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding. It is what lets me comprehend Buddha, but also what keeps me from following him.

In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left — ignorant how to react — with a foolish grin.

Torn between violence and disillusionment, I seem to myself a terrorist who, going out in the street to perpetrate some outrage, stops on the way to consult Ecclesiastes or Epictetus.

Each time I have a lapse of memory, I think of the anguish which must afflict those who know they no longer remember anything. But something tells me that after a certain time a secret joy possesses them, a joy they would not agree to trade for any of their memories, even the most stirring. …

We should have abided by our larval condition, dispensed with evolution, remained incomplete, delighting in the elemental siesta and calmly consuming ourselves in an embryonic ecstasy.

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.

Never judge a man without putting yourself in his place.” This old proverb makes all judgment impossible, for we judge someone only because, in fact, we cannot put ourselves in his place.

When you meditate all day on the inopportuneness of birth, everything you plan and everything you perform seems pathetic, futile. You are like a madman who, cured, does nothing but think of the crisis from which he has emerged, the "dream" he has left behind; he keeps harking back to it, so that his cure is of no benefit to him whatever.

When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment’s thought to the “meaning” of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not in abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.

If we consider closely our so-called generous actions, there is none which, from some aspect, is not blameworthy an even harmful, so that we come to regret having performed it—so that we must choose, finally, between abstention and remorse.

I was walking late one night along a tree-lined path; a chestnut fell at my feet. The noise it made as it burst, the resonance it provoked in me, and an upheaval out of all proportion to this insignificant event thrust me into miracle, into the rapture of the definitive, as if there were no more questions—only answers. I was drunk on a thousand unexpected discoveries, none of which I could make use of. … This is how I nearly reached the Supreme. But instead I went on with my walk.

During the long nights in the caves, how many Hamlets must have murmured their endless monologues—for it is likely that the apogee of metaphysical torment is to be located well before that universal insipidity which followed the advent of Philosophy.

It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should avoid simulacra and even “realities"; you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a “solitary elephant.

A work is finished when we can no longer improve it, though we know it to be inadequate and incomplete. We are so overtaxed by it that we no longer have the power to add a single comma, however indispensable. What determines the degree to which a work is done is not a requirement of art or of truth, it is exhaustion and, even more, disgust.

Only to the degree that our moments afford us some contact with death do we have some chance to glimpse on what insanity all existence is based.

The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them.

Each opinion, each view is necessarily partial, truncated, inadequate. In philosophy and in anything, originality comes down to incomplete definitions.

Our obsession with birth, by shifting us to a point before our past, robs us of our pleasure in the future, in the present, and even in the past.

If it is true that God dislikes taking sides, I should feel no awkwardness in His presence, so pleased would I be to imitate Him, to be like Him, in everything, “without opinion.

Arbori masacraţi. Răsar case. Mutre, mutre pretutindeni: omul e cancerul Pământului.

Kill yourself because of what you are, yes, but not because all humanity would spit in your face!

Everything that lives makes noise. What an argument for the mineral kingdom!

What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself.

الحر هو من تبيّن بطلان كل وجهات النظر، والمتحرر هو من استخلص العبرة من ذلك.

What music appeals to in us it is difficult to know; what we do know is that music reaches a zone so deep that madness itself cannot penetrate there.

Cu cât e cineva mai dăruit, cu atât înaintează mai greu în plan spiritual. Talentul e un obstacol pentru viaţa interioară.

If there is so much discomfort and ambiguity in lucidity, it is because lucidity is the result of the poor use to which we have put our sleepless nights.

My mission Is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

The West: a sweet-smelling rottenness, a perfumed corpse.

Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.

When we are young, we take a certain pleasure in our infirmities. They seem so new, so rich! With age, they no longer surprise us, we know them too well. Now, without anything unexpected in them, they do not deserve to be endured.

Only normal that man should no longer be interested in religion but in religions, for only through them will he be in a position to understand the many versions of his spiritual collapse.

It is our discomforts which provoke, which create consciousness; their task accomplished, they weaken and disappear one after the other. Consciousness however remains and survives them, without recalling what it owes to them, without even ever having known. Hence it continually proclaims its autonomy, its sovereignty, even when it loathes itself and would do away with itself.

At the climax of failure, at the moment when shame is about to do us in, suddenly we are swept away by a frenzy of pride which lasts only long enough to drain us, to leave us without energy, to lower, with our powers, the intensity of our shame.

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.

We invest ourselves with an abusive superiority when we tell someone what we think of him and of what he does. Frankness is not compatible with a delicate sentiment, nor even with an ethical exigency.

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.

For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened. …" No sooner are they open than the drama beings. To look without understanding—that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much. …

Children turn, and must turn, against their parents, and the parents can do nothing about it, for they are subject to a law which decrees the relations among all the living: i.e., that each engenders his own enemy.

Once we appeal to our most intimate selves, once we begin to labor and to produce, we lay claim to gifts, we become unconscious of our own gaps. No one is in a position to admit that what comes out of his own depths might be worthless. “Self-knowledge"? A contradiction in terms.

Să zgîlţîi oamenii, să-i trezeşti din somn, deşi ştii că prin asta săvîrşeşti o crimă şi că ar fi de o mie de ori mai bine să-i laşi să-şi vadă de treaba lor, pentru că, de altfel, cînd se trezesc, n-ai nimic să le propui...

We do not adopt a belief because it is true (they are all true), but because some obscure power impels us to do so. When this power leaves us, we suffer prostration and collapse, a tete-a-tete with what is left of ourselves.

I was alone in that cemetery overlooking the village when a pregnant woman came in. I left at once, in order not to look at this corpse-bearer at close range, nor to ruminate upon the contrast between an aggressive womb and the time-worn tombs -- between a false promise and the end of promises.

A man who survives himself despises himself without acknowledging as much, sometimes without even knowing as much.

When, getting too used to ourselves, we begin to loathe ourselves, we soon realize that we are worse off, that self-hatred actually strengthens self-attachment.

The more gifted a man is, the less progress he makes on the spiritual level. Talent is an obstacle to the inner life.

Look neither ahead nor behind, look into yourself, with neither fear nor regret. No one descends into himself so long as he remains a slave of the past or of the future.

Every friendship is an inconspicuous drama, a series of subtle wounds.

Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.

Each generation lives in the absolute: it behaves as if it had reached the apex if not the end of history.

The satisfaction we take from performing a task (especially when we have no belief in the task and even disdain it) shows to what degree we still belong to the rabble.

Due nemici sono lo stesso uomo dimezzato.

Trei dimineaţa. Simt secunda de faţă, apoi pe cealaltă, fac bilanţul fiecărui minut. De ce toate astea? Pentru că m-am născut.

Să te răzvrăteşti împotriva eredităţii înseamnă să te răzvrăteşti împotriva a miliarde de ani, împotriva primeicelule.

What misery a sensation is! Ecstasy itself, perhaps, is nothing more.

C'est d'un type spécial de veilles que dérive la mise en cause de la naissance

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. . . .

Rather in a gutter than on a pedestal.

Even when they desert hell, men do so only to reconstruct it elsewhere.

Everything that is engenders, sooner or later, nightmares. Let us try, therefore, to invent something better than being.

بمجرد التفكير في أن لا أكون ولدت، أي سعادة! أي حرية! أي مدى.

يلعب العقل دور معكر الصفو بالنسبة إلى كل أفعال الحياة.

A passion for music is in itself an avowal. We know more about a stranger who yields himself up to it than about someone who is deaf to music and whom we see every day.

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

We should have been excused from lugging a body: the burden of the self is enough.

True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.

The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.

Nu cunosc pe nimeni mai inutil şi mai inutilizabil ca mine. E un fapt pe care ar trebui să-l accept pur şi simplu,fără să mă consider cîtuşi de puţin mîndru pentru asta. Dacă nu va fi aşa, conştiinţa inutilităţii mele nu-mi vaservi la nimic.

As the years accumulate, we form an increasingly somber image of the future. Is this only to console ourselves for being excluded from it? Yes in appearance, no in fact, for the future has always been hideous, man being able to remedy his evils only by aggravating them, so that in each epoch existence, is much more tolerable before the solution is found to the difficulties of the moment.

Că s-a spus totul, că nu mai e nimic de spus — o ştim, o simţim. Dar ceea ce simţim mai puţin e că această evidenţă conferă limbajului un statut straniu, chiar îngrijorător, care-l eliberează. Cuvintele sunt în sfîrşit salvate, pentru că au încetat să trăiască.

The notion that it would have been better never to exist is among those which meet with the most opposition. Every man, incapable of seeing himself except from inside, regards himself as necessary, even indispensable, every man feels and perceives himself as an absolute reality, as a whole, as the whole. The moment we identify ourselves entirely with our being, we react like God, we are God. It is only when we live at once within and on the margins of ourselves that we can conceive, quite calmly, that it would have been preferable that the accident we are should never have occurred.

It is easier to get on with vices than with virtues. The vices, accommodating by nature, help each other, are full of mutual indulgence, whereas the jealous virtues combat and annihilate each other, showing in everything their incompatibility and their intolerence

A força explosiva da mais pequena mortificação. Todo o desejo vencido nos torna poderosos. Quanto mais nos afastamos dele, e a ele deixamos de aderir, melhor dominamos este mundo. A renúncia confere um poder infinito.

There are nights that the most ingenious torturers could not have invented. We emerge from them in pieces, stupid, dazed, with neither memories nor anticipations, and without even knowing who we are. And it is then that the day seems useless, light pernicious, even more oppressive than the darkness.

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?

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.

We should repeat to ourselves, every day: I am one of the billions dragging himself across the earth's surface. One, and no more. This banality justifies any conclusion, any behavior or action: debauchery, chastity, suicide, work, crime, sloth, or rebellion...Whence it follows that each man is right to do what he does.

Here on the coast of Normandy, at this hour of the morning, I needed no one. The very gulls’ presence bothered me: I drove them off with stones. And hearing their supernatural shrieks, I realized that that was just what I wanted, that only the Sinister could soothe me, and that it was for such a confrontation that I had got up before dawn.

After a sleepless night, the people in the street seem automatons. No one seems to breathe, to walk. Each looks as if he is worked by clockwork: nothing spontaneous; mechanical smiles, spectral gesticulations. Yourself a specter, how would you see others as alive?

A serious, honest mind understands—and can understand—nothing of history. History in return is marvelously suited to delight an erudite cynic.

To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell.

The dissolving power of conversation. One realizes why both meditation and action require silence.

In order not to have to resolve them, I have turned all my practical difficulties into theoretical ones. Faced with the Insoluble, I breathe at last. . . .

What right have you to pray for me? I need no intercessor, I shall manage alone. The prayers of a wretch I might accept, but no one else’s, not even a saint’s. I cannot bear your bothering about my salvation. If I apprehend salvation and flee it, your prayers are merely an indiscretion. Invest them elsewhere; in any case, we do not serve the same gods. If mine are impotent, there is every reason to believe yours are no less so. Even assuming they are as you imagine them, they would still lack the power to cure me of a horror older than my memory.

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.

When someone tells us of an unfavorable opinion about ourselves, instead of being distressed, we should think of all the “evil” we have spoken of others, and realize that it is only justice that as much should be said of ourselves. Ironically, no one is more vulnerable, more susceptible, and less likely to acknowledge his own defects than the backbiter. Merely tell him about the slightest reservation someone has made in his regard, and he will lose countenance, lose his temper, and drown in his own bile.

What a bore, someone who doesn’t deign to make an impression. 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. On the other hand, we turn livid with fury in the presence of someone who pays no attention whatever to the effect he makes. What are we to say to him, and what are we to expect from him? Either keep some vestiges of the monkey, or else stay home.

In the 'Gospel According to the Egyptians,' Jesus proclaims: 'Men will be the victims of death so long as women give birth.' And he specifies: 'I am come to destroy the works of woman.' When we frequent the extreme truths of the Gnostics, we should like to go, if possible, still further, to say something never said, which petrifies or pulverizes history, something out of a cosmic Neronianism, out of a madness on the scale of matter.

To have opinions is inevitable, is natural; to have convictions is less so. Each time I meet someone who has convictions, I wonder what intellectual vice, what flaw has caused him to acquire such a thing. However legitimate this question, my habit of raising it spoils the pleasure of conversation for me, gives me a bad conscience, makes me hateful in my own eyes.

The notion that it would have been better never to exist is among those which meet with the most opposition. Every man, incapable of seeing himself except from inside, regards himself as necessary, even indispensable, every man feels and perceives himself as an absolute reality, as a whole, as the whole. The moment we identify ourselves entirely with our own being, we react like God, we are God. It is only when we live at once within and on the margins of ourselves that we can conceive, quite calmly, that it would have been preferable that the accident we are should never have occurred.

If I reflect on any moment of my life, the most feverish or the most neutral, what remains? — and what difference is there now between them? Everything having become the same, without relief and without reality, it is when I felt nothing that I was closest to the truth, I mean to my present state in which I am recapitulating my experiences. What is the use of having felt anything at all? There is no “ecstasy” which either memory or imagination can resuscitate!

In order to conquer panic or some tenacious anxiety, there is nothing like imagining your own burial. An effective method, readily available to all. In order not to have to resort to it too often in the course of a day, best to experience its benefit straight off, when you get up. Or else use it only at exceptional moments, like Pope Innocent IX, who, having commissioned a painting in which he was shown on his deathbed, glanced at it each time he had to make some important decision.

Există şi din cei care iau timpul însuşi drept unitate, şi care se ridică uneori deasupra lui: pentru ei, ce muncă, ce proiect merită luat în serios ? Cel care vede prea departe, cel care e contemporanul oricărui viitor, nu mai poate să se agite, nici chiar să mai facă vreo mişcare... Gîndul precarităţii mă întovărăşeşte în orice ocazie: punînd, în dimineaţa asta, o scrisoare la poştă, îmi spuneam că ea era adresată unui muritor. O singură experienţă absolută, legata de orice, şi faci, în propriii tăi ochi, figură de supravieţuitor.

Naştere şi lanţ sîrit sinonime. Sa vezi lumina zilei înseamnă să vezi cătuşe...Dacă am putea dormi douăzeci şi patru de ore din douăzeci şi patru, am regăsi cu repeziciune marasmul primordial, beatitudinea lîncezelii fără cusur de dinaintea Facerii — visul oricărei conştiinţe excedate de sine.Să nu te naşti este, fără doar şi poate, cea mai bună formulă care există. Ea nu e, din nefericire, la îndemînanimănui. Nimeni n-a iubit mai mult ca mine această lume şi, cu toate acestea, dacă mi-ar fi fost oferită pe tavă, chiar copilaş fi exclamat: „Prea tîrziu, prea tîrziu!"Ce aveţi, ce s-a îndmplat ? — N-am nimic, n-am nimic, am făcut o săritură în afara destinului meu, şi nu mai ştiuacum spre ce să mă întorc, spre ce să fug...