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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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. …

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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. …

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.

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.

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?

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.

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!

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.

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. …

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.