Emil Cioran

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.

Emil Cioran (8 April 1911 – 20 June 1995) was a Romanian philosopher and essayist whose work is known for its pervasive philosophical pessimism, which frequently engages with issues of suffering, decay, and nihilism.

Quotes

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.

Romanian title: Pe culmile disperării

• "At the edge of life you feel that you are no longer master of the life within you, that subjectivity is an illusion, and that uncontrollable forces are seething inside you, evolving with no relation to a personal center or a definite, individual rhythm.", essay 2 - On not wanting to live
• "I ask myself; Why is it that only some people suffer? Why are only some selected from the ranks of normal people and put on the torture rack? Some religions maintain that God is trying us through suffering, or that we expiate evil and unbelief through it. If such an explanation can satisfy the religious man, it is not sufficient for anyone who notices that suffering is arbitrary and unjust, because the innocent often suffer most. There is no valid justification for suffering. Suffering has no hierarchy of values.", in essay: the monopoly of suffering
• "The most interesting aspect of suffering is the sufferer's belief in its absoluteness. He believes he has a monopoly on suffering. I think that I alone suffer, that I alone have the right to suffer, although I also realize that there are modalities of suffering more terrible than mine, pieces of flesh falling from the bones, the body crumbling under one's very eyes, monstrous, criminal , shameful sufferings. One asks oneself, How can this be, and if it be, how can one still speak of finality and other such old wives' tales? Suffering moves me so much that I lose all my courage. I lose heart because I do not understand why there is suffering in the world.", in essay: the monopoly of suffering
• maybe suffering has no more justification than life.
• No one commits suicide for external reasons, only because of inner disequilibrium. Under similar adverse circumstances, some are indifferent, some are moved, some are driven to suicide.
• I admire only two types of people: the potentially mad and the potential suicide.
• Why don't I commit suicide? Because I am as sick of death as I am of life.
• I don't need any support, advice, or compassion, because even if I am the most ruinous man, I still feel so powerful, so strong and fierce. For I am the only one that lives without hope.

• There are questions which, once approached, either isolate you or kill you outright.

• One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death's prisoner.

• Haven't people learned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles?

• Knowledge is the plague of life, and consciousness, an open wound in its heart.

• Tears do not burn except in solitude.

• If there was a God of sorrow, he would grow black heavy wings, to soar not for the skies, but for inferno.

• What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?

• I don't understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn't it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?

• We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.

• If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.

• True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.

• How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history — greater than the fall of empires — I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.

• I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.

• The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion, when the intuition of disaster is so painful that it almost provokes a greater madness [...] One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.

• I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.
• Only those are happy who never think or, rather, who only think about life's bare necessities, and to think about such things means not to think at all. True thinking resembles a demon who muddies the spring of life or a sickness which corrupts its roots. To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life, to leave behind you, as symbols of your life's drama, a trail of smoke and blood — all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you.

• The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.

• How I wish I didn't know anything about myself and this world!

• There are no arguments. Can anyone who has reached the limit bother with arguments, causes, effects, moral considerations, and so forth? Of course not. For such a person there are only unmotivated motives for living. On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos. When all the current reasons — moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on — no longer guide one's life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.

• How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.

• Great joys, why do they bring us sadness? Because there remains from these excesses only a feeling of irrevocable loss and desertion which reaches a high degree of negative intensity. At such moments, instead of a gain, one keenly feels loss. sadness accompanies all those events in which life expends itself. its intensity is equal to its loss. Thus death causes the greatest sadness.

• To tell the truth, I couldn't care less about the relativity of knowledge, simply because the world does not deserve to be known.

• We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.

• I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to empty abstraction.

• One of the biggest paradoxes of our world: memories vanish when we want to remember, but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget.

• Compared to the refined culture of sclerotic forms and frames, which mask everything, the lyrical mode is utterly barbarian in its expression. Its value resides precisely in its savage quality: it is only blood, sincerity, and fire.

• The terrifying experience and obsession of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of yourself. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness.

• Out of the shadow of the abstract man, who thinks for the pleasure of thinking, emerges the organic man, who thinks because of a vital imbalance, and who is beyond science and art.

• I am displeased with everything. If they made me God, I would immediately resign.

• Everything is possible, and yet nothing is. All is permitted, and yet again, nothing. No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it's all the same whether you cry or remain silent. There is an explanation for everything, and yet there is none. Everything is both real and unreal, normal and absurd, splendid and insipid. There is nothing worth more than anything else, nor any idea better than any other. Why grow sad from one's sadness and delight in one's joy? What does it matter whether our tears come from pleasure or pain? Love your unhappiness and hate your happiness, mix everything up, scramble it all! Be a snowflake dancing in the air, a flower floating downstream! Have courage when you don't need to, and be a coward when you must be brave! Who knows? You may still be a winner! And if you lose, does it really matter? Is there anything to win in this world? All gain is loss, all loss is gain. Why always expect a definite stance, clear ideas, meaningful words? I feel as if I should spout fire in response to all the questions which were ever put, or not put, to me.

• As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and aesthetic ideals? It's all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?

• Can it really be that for us existence means exile, and nothingness, home?

• I have no ideas, only obsessions. Anybody can have ideas. Ideas have never caused anybody’s downfall.
  • [1]

The Book of Delusions (1936)

Romanian title: Cartea amăgirilor

• No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity; — for thoughts, there is always time; life has its time; there is no thought that comes too late; any desire can become a regret.

• All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.

• Everyone must destroy their life. According to the way they do it, they're either triumphants or failures.

• The reaction against your own thought in itself lends life to thought. How this reaction is born is hard to describe, because it identifies with the very rare intellectual tragedies. — The tension, the degree and level of intensity of a thought proceeds from its internal antinomies, which in turn are derived from the unsolvable contradictions of a soul. Thought cannot solve the contradictions of the soul. As far as linear thinking is concerned, thoughts mirror themselves in other thoughts, instead of mirroring a destiny.

• A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It's not easy to be on the wrong foot with life

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

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

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

• I don't understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.

• The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity... Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does this whispering voice say? Everything in us that is not human anymore.

• To withstand any truth...

• All philosophers should end their days at Pythia's feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.

• That fear which gives birth to thoughts, and the fear of thoughts...

• To detach yourself elegantly from the world; to give contour and grace to sadness; a solitude in style; a walk that gives cadence to memories; stepping towards the intangible; with the breath in the trembling margins of things; the past reborn in the overflow of fragrances; the smell, through which we conquer time; the contour of the invisible things; the forms of the immaterial; to deepen yourself in the intangible; to touch the world airborne by smell; aerial dialogue and gliding dissolution; to bathe in your own reflecting fragmentation...

• Detachment from the world as an attachment to the ego... Who can realize the detachment in which you are as far away from yourself as you are from the world?

• Only thoughts that are randomly born die. The other thoughts we carry with us without knowing them. They have abandoned themselves to forgetfulness so that they can be with us all the time.

• What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!

Tears and Saints (1937)

Romanian title: Lacrimi și Sfinți

• This world was created from God's fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator. Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we live dramas for the boredom of a spectator, whose claps have never reached the ears of a mortal.

• Consciousness is nature's nightmare.

• Saints live in flames; wise men, next to them.

• A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.

• As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.

• ...all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint.

• To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze.

• Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.

• Sadness makes you God's prisoner.

• Life is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it.

• 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.

• Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.

• Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.

• If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.

• Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world.

• Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don't know, and we don't really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.

• The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness.

• The initial revelation of any monastery: everything is nothing. Thus begin all mysticisms. It is less than one step from nothing to God, for God is the positive expression of nothingness.

• There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.

• The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It's not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.

• A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people.

• The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.

• To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing

• All that is Life in me urges me to give up God.

• Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.

• Love of the absolute engenders a predilection for self-destruction. Hence the passion for monasteries and brothels. Cells and women, in both cases. Weariness with life fares well in the shadow of whores and saintly women.

• Heroes abound at the dawn of civilizations, during pre-Homeric and Gothic epochs, when people, not having yet experienced spiritual torture, satisfy their thirst for renunciation through a derivative: heroism.

• Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are.

• As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.

• To fear is to die every minute.

• From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.

• Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion.

A Short History of Decay (1949)

French title: Précis de décomposition

• Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith — of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever. The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth. We are unfair to a Nero, a Tiberius: it was not they who invented the concept heretic: they were only degenerate dreamers who happened to be entertained by massacres. The real criminals are men who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic.

• A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth, where our mania for salvation makes life unbreathable.

• Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it; hence the mind feels more comfortable in the society of a braggart than in that of a martyr; and nothing is more repugnant to it than the spectacle of dying for an idea.

• In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world

• The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are. If we had the right sense of our position in the world, if to compare were inseparable from to live, the revelation of our infinitesimal presence would crush us. But to live is to blind ourselves to our own dimensions. . . .

• Death is too exact; it has all the reasons on its side. Mysterious for our instincts, it takes shape, to our reflection, limpid, without glamor, and without the false lures of the unknown. By dint of accumulating non-mysteries and monopolizing non-meanings, life inspires more dread than death: it is life which is the Great Unknown.

• So it is that after each night, facing a new day, the impossible necessity of dealing with it fills us with dread; exiled in light as if the world had just started, inventing the sun, we flee from tears—just one of which would be enough to wash us out of time.

• Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

• Born in a prison, with burdens on our shoulders and our thoughts, we could not reach the end of a single day if the possibilities of ending it all did not incite us to begin the next day all over again.

• No one has the audacity to exclaim: "I don't want to do anything!" — we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions.

• Nothing surpasses the pleasures of idleness: even if the end of the world were to come, I would not leave my bed at an ungodly hour.

• We replace God as best we can; for every god is good, provided he perpetuates in eternity our desire for a crucial solitude. . . .

• Thought is as much a lie as love or faith.

• Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.

• Society: an inferno of saviors!

• The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.

• Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.

• Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation.

• The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue.

• His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.

• By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.

• Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun.

• Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.

• But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle. . .

• Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?

• I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.

• In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

• Irons and the unbreathable air of this world strip us of everything, except the freedom to kill ourselves; and this freedom grants us a strength and pride to triumph over the loads which overwhelm us.

• In a single second we do away with all seconds; God himself could not do as much.

• But, braggart demons, we postpone our end: how could we renounce the display of our freedom, the show of our pride?

• This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears.

• The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue.

• Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.

• His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.

• By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.

• Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle...

• Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?

• What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name — and moving on.

• Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

• Life inspires more dread than death — it is life which is the great unknown.

• Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

• Reality is a creation of our excesses.

• Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

• Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.

• We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

• Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.

• Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

• Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.

• Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

• By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

• Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

• We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.

• Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

• We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

• So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.

• The universal view melts things into a blur.

• Truths begin by a conflict with the police — and end by calling them in.

• At different degrees, everything is pathology, except for indifference.

• Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

• To Live signifies to believe and hope — to lie and to lie to oneself.

• When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

• Vague a l'ame — melancholy yearning for the end of the world.

• You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness.

• Try to be free: you will die of hunger.

• I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action — mother of all vices — I am the cause of no one's suffering.

• History shows that the thinkers who mounted on the top of the ladder of questions, who set their foot on the last rung, that of the absurd, have bequeathed to posterity only an example of sterility.

• History proves nothing because it contains everything.

• Nothing is indefensible — from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime.

• Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?

• To repeat to yourself a thousand times a day: 'Nothing on Earth has any worth,' to keep finding yourself at the same point, to circle stupidly as a top, eternally...

• I dream of wanting — and all I want seems to me worthless.

• I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide.

• As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad.

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

French title: Syllogismes de l'amertume

• The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

• If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.

• The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

• The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life.

• "I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside." This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works on introspection.

• Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life.

• There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.

• Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.

• Death poses a problem which replaces all the others. What is deadly to philosophy, to the naive belief in the hierarchy of perplexities.

• The advantage of meditating upon life and death is being able to say anything at all about them.

• Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn't deserve to be known.

• In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart. Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.

• Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands?

• Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves — that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it.

• We suffer: the external world begins to exist . . . ; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality.

• Boredom is a larval anxiety; depression, a dreamy hatred.

• Philosophy offers an antidote to melancholy. And many still believe in the depth of philosophy!

• Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.

• If someone incessantly drops the word "life," you know he's a sick man.

• Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.

• Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth . . .

• Awareness of time: assault on time . . .

• Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.

• Thanks to depression — that alpinism of the indolent — we scale every summit and daydream over every precipice from our bed.

• If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.

• I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away.

• The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.

• Of all calumnies the worst is the one which attacks our indolence, which contests its authenticity.

• Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.

• You have dreamed of setting the world ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light up a single one!

• No longer ask me for my program: isn't breathing one?

• What anxiety when one is not sure of one's doubts or wonders: are these actually doubts?

• To hope is to contradict the future.

• However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; — unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them. The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.

• Only the idiot is equipped to breathe.

• The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?

• The Creation was the first act of sabotage.

• For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.

• Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.

• The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world.

• We always love . . . despite; and that "despite" covers an infinity.

• In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future.

• Anxiety — or the fanaticism of the worst.

• Without its assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation?

• I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide . . .

• "Where do you get those superior airs of yours?" "I've managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?"

• The moment we believe we've understood everything grants us the look of a murderer.

• Only optimists commit suicide, the optimists who can no longer be . . . optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?

• On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I."

• No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.

The Temptation to Exist (1956)

French title: La tentation d'exister

• Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious.

• The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to form a reality to reality's detriment.

• If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

• A minimum of unconsciousness is necessary if one wants to stay inside history. To act is one thing; to know one is acting is another. When lucidity invests the action, insinuates itself into it, action is undone, and with it, prejudice, whose function consists, precisely, in subordinating, in enslaving consciousness to action. The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depths. No man concerned with his equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.

• The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.

• Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

• The wrinkles of a nation are as visible as those of an individual.

• A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints.

History and Utopia (1960)

French title: Histoire et utopie

• Pursued by our origins...we all are.

• If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned — a saint or a corpse.

• Tolerance — the function of an extinguished ardor — tolerance cannot seduce the young.

• What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.

• Glory — once achieved, what is it worth?

• What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?

• Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.

• It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: in truth, it is itself the quintessence of injustice.

• Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.

• No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

• For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

• Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself — there is no wish I make more often.

• I seem to myself, among civilised men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.

• A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.

• Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.

• A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

• A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.

• One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

• Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.

• I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.

• Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

• The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it.

• Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.

• In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.

• We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

• Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.

• Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.

• To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

• Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.

• If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.

• In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.

• The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.

• Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.

• To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.

• Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself.

• Word — that invisible dagger.

• Doutbless, revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim, or else we are tangled in the subtleties of remorse; so vengeance too has its venom, though it comes closer to what we are, to what we feel, to the very law of the self; it is also healthier than magnanimity. The Furies were held to antedate the gods, Zeus included. Vengeance before Divinity! This is the Major intuition of ancient mythology.
  • p. 70.

• The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

• Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.

• We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

• Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

• Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?

• Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

• That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.

• What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you — what a revelation.

• To act is to anchor in the imminent future.

• Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?

• We are all secularised anarchists today.

The Fall Into Time (1964)

French title: La chute dans le temps

• Love, a tacit agreement between two unhappy parties to overestimate each other.
  • p. 111, first American edition (1970)

• There is only this swarm of dying creatures stricken with longevity, all the more hateful in that they are so good at organizing their agony.
  • p. 120, first American edition (1970)

• He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.
  • p. 178, first American edition (1970)

The New Gods (1969)

French title: Le mauvais démiurge

• Creation is in fact a fault, man's famous sin thereby appearing as a minor version of a much graver one. What are we guilty of, except of having followed, more or less slavishly, the Creator's example? Easy to recognize in ourselves the fatality which was His: not for nothing have we issued from the hands of a wicked and woebegone god, a god accursed.

• Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence.
• “Meeting, after several years, someone we used to know as a child, the first glance almost always suggests that some great disaster must have befallen him” Leopardi, quoted by cioran.
• We should, out of decency, choose for ourselves the moment to disappear.
• Jean Paul calls the most important night of his life the one when he discovered there was no difference between dying the next day or in thirty years. A revelation as significant as it is futile; if we occasionally manage to grasp its cogency, we resist on the other hand drawing its consequences, in immediacy the difference in question seeming to each of us somehow irreducible, even absolute: to exist is to prove that we have not understood to what point it is all one and the same thing to die now or no matter when.
• The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
• To reckon on anything at all, here or elsewhere, is to afford proofs that we are still burdened with chains. The reprobate aspires to paradise; this aspiration disparages, compromises him. To be free is to rid yourself forever of the notion of reward, it is to expect nothing of men or gods, it is to renounce not only this world and all worlds but salvation itself—it is to destroy even the notion of it, that chain among chains.
• It is debasing to die the way one does; it is intolerable to be exposed to an end over which we have no control, an end which lies in wait for us, overthrows us, casts us into the unnameable.

• It is difficult, it is impossible to believe that the Good Lord — "Our Father" — had a hand in the scandal of creation. Everything suggests that He took no part in it, that it proceeds from a god without scruples, a feculent god. Goodness does not create, lacking imagination; it takes imagination to put together a world, however botched. At the very least, there must be a mixture of good and evil in order to produce an action or a work.

• In order to conceive, and to steep ourselves in, unreality, we must have it constantly present to our minds. The day we feel it, see it, everything becomes unreal, except that unreality which alone makes existence tolerable.

• Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what — it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?

• In theory, it matters little to me whether I live as whether I die; in practice, I am lacerated by every anxiety which opens an abyss between life and death.

• The flesh spreads, further and further, like a gangrene upon the surface of the globe. It cannot impose limits upon itself, it continues to be rife despite its rebuffs, it takes its defeats for conquests, it has never learned anything. It belongs above all to the realm of the Creator, and it is indeed in the flesh that He has projected His maleficent instincts.

• Facing a landscape annihilated by the light, to remain serene supposes a temper I do not have. The sun is my purveyor of black thoughts; and summer the season when I have always reconsidered my relations with this world and with myself, to the greatest prejudice of both.

• A man does not kill himself, as is commonly supposed, in a fit of madness but rather in a fit of unendurable lucidity, in a paroxysm which may, if so desired, be identified with madness; for an excessive perspicacity, carried to the limit and of which one longs to be rid at all costs, exceeds the context of reason.

• Why don't I kill myself? If I knew exactly what keeps me from doing so, I should have no more questions to ask myself since I should have answered them all.

• Only those moments count when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than to exchange a word with someone.

• Endless brooding over a question undermines you as much as a dull pain.

• Psychoanalysis will be entirely discredited one of these days, no doubt about it. Which will not keep it from destroying our last vestiges of naivete. After psychoanalysis, we can never again be innocent.

• The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

• When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.

• To make more plans than an explorer or a crook, yet to be infected at the will's very root.

• Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.

• The mind advances only when it has the patience to go in circles, in other words, to deepen.

• I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.

• To conceive a thought — just one, but one that would tear the universe to pieces.

• There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

• An anxious man constructs his terrors, then installs himself within them: a stay-at-home in a yawning chasm.

• The skeptic is the least mysterious man in the world, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world.

• It is unjust to call imaginary the diseases which are, on the contrary, only too real, since they proceed from our mind, the only regulator of our equilibrium and our health.

• To suffer is to produce knowledge.

• When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.

• Skepticism is an exercise in defascination.

• What place do we occupy in the "universe"? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we are evidently so insignificant? Once we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.

• Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

• The only subversive mind is the one that questions the obligation to exist; all the others, the anarchist at the top of the list, compromise with the established order.

• They ask you for facts, proofs, works, and all you can show them are transformed tears.

• We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.
  • variant: The fact that living is an extraordinary thing seeing things as they are, That this life is theoretically completely worthless, Seems extraordinary compared to the actual level, This means Live despite all adversities, Every moment becomes a kind of heroism

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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.

French title: De l'inconvénient d'être né

Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that we alone pursue 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.

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.

• 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.
• My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding. It is what lets me comprehend Buddha, but also what keeps me from following him.
• I am enraptured by Hindu philosophy, whose essential endeavor is to surmount the self; and everything I do, everything I think is only myself and the selfs humiliations.
• 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

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

• 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.

• Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.
• The first thinker was, without a doubt, the first man obsessed by why. An unaccustomed mania, not at all contagious: rare indeed are those who suffer from it, who are a prey to questioning, and who can accept no given because they were born in consternation.

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

• 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.

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

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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?

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface...

• The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools.

• I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which has spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations.

• Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.

• It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.

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

• When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.

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

• What are you waiting for in order to give up?

• The farther men get from God, the farther they advance into the knowledge of religions.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.

• Late at night. I feel like falling into a frenzy, doing some unprecedented thing to release myself, but I don't see against whom, against what...

• The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.

• Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.

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

• One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.

• Buddhism calls anger "corruption of the mind," Manicheism "root of the tree of death." I know this, but what good does it do me to know?

• 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.

• Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!

• Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.

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

• We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.
• Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

• Two enemies — the same man divided.

• 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 abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.

• We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.

• The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character — precisely that and nothing more.

• Self-knowledge — the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?

• 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.

• In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.

• Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that we alone pursue 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.

• "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.

• Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?

• 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...with a foolish grin.

• 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?

• The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?

• 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.

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

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

• 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.

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

• Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral...

• The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

• No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.

• We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

• Nothing deserves to be undone, doubtless because nothing deserved to be done.

• Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

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

• "What's wrong — what's the matter with you?" Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for...

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

• Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.

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

• God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.

• Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again.

• 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.

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

• To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement.

• Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying? — that void is consciousness itself.

• There is no false sensation.

• To think that so many have succeeded in dying!

• We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

"What is truth?" is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to "How to endure life?" And even this one pales beside the next: "How to endure oneself?" — That is the crucial question in which no one is in a position to give us an answer.

French title: Écartelèment

• What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.

• Existing is plagiarism.

• A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...

• Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.

• I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end.

• Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

• Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!

• Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?

• Impossible to accede to truth by opinions, for each opinion is only a mad perspective of reality.

• There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another.

• Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself.

• To be is to be cornered.

• "Neither this world, nor the next, nor happiness are for the being abandoned to doubt." — This point in the Gita is my death sentence.

• I want to proclaim a truth that would forever exile me from among the living. I know only the conditions but not the words that would allow me to formulate it.

• To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire.

• One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.

• As soon as one returns to Doubt (if it could be said that one has ever left it), undertaking anything at all seems not so much useless as extravagant. Doubt works deep within you like a disease, or even more effectively, like a faith.

• How can you know if you are in the truth? The criterion is simple enough: if others make a vacuum around you, there is not a doubt in the world that you are closer to the essential than they are.

• Get hold of yourself, be confident once more, don't forget that it is not given to just anyone to have idolized discouragement without succumbing to it.

• The state of health is a state of nonsensation, even of nonreality. As soon as we cease to suffer, we cease to exist.

• By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?

• To try curing someone of a "vice," of what is the deepest thing he has, is to attack his very being, and this is indeed how he himself understands it, since he will never forgive you for wanting him to destroy himself in your way and not his.

• The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous.

• We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.

• We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die. — Didn't you know that's how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?

• In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.

• Eternity is absence.

• Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man.

• When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years.

• "What is truth?" is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to "How to endure life?" And even this one pales beside the next: "How to endure oneself?" — That is the crucial question in which no one is in a position to give us an answer.

• Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.

• One disgust, then another — to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind...The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive.

• After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?

• What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.

• Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!

• To think is to run after insecurity, to be demoralized for grandiose trifles, to immure oneself in abstractions with a martyr's avidity, to hunt up complications the way others pursue collapse or gain. The thinker is by definition keen for torment.

• It makes no sense to say that death is the goal of life, but what else is there to say?

• We regret not having the courage to make such and such decision; we regret much more having made one — any one. Better no action than the consequences of an action.

• "You really should come to the house — one of these days we might die without having seen each other again." — "Since we have to die in any case, what's the use of seeing each other again?"

• Everyone is mistaken, everyone lives in illusion. At best, we can admit a scale of fictions, a hierarchy of unrealities, giving preference to one rather than to another; but to choose, no, definitely not that...

• Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god.

• All morning, I did nothing but repeat: "Man is an abyss, man is an abyss." — I could not, alas, find anything better.

• Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

• Hope is the normal form of delirium.

• Try as I will, I don't see what might exist...

• If I were to go blind, what would bother me the most would be no longer to be able to stare idiotically at the passing clouds.

• We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false.

• The worst is not ennui nor despair but their encounter, their collision. To be crushed between the two!

• When we know what words are worth, the amazing thing is that we try to say anything at all, and that we manage to do so. This requires, it is true, a supernatural nerve.

• To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion.

• Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream.

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing — between two fictions.

French title: Aveux et anathèmes

• One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland — and no other.
  • Variant translation: We inhabit a language rather than a country.

• Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

• Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

• A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse.

• Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.

• For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.

• To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.

• What is not heartrending is superfluous, at least in music.

• What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!

• The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live — moreover, the only one.

• The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so...

• My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.

• When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment.

• When you love someone, you hope — the more closely to be attached — that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.

• I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the Gods have been against me.

• It is not by genius, it is by suffering, and suffering alone, that one ceases to be a marionette.

• The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

• How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.

• Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing — between two fictions.

• If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!

• This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.

• Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.

• To dream of an enterprise of demolition that would spare none of the traces of the original Big Bang.

• There exists, I grant you, a clinical depression, upon which certain remedies occasionally have effect; but there exists another kind, a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself.

• I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.

• Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.

• Of all that makes us suffer, nothing — so much as disappointment — gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.

• Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.

• There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.

• What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!

• To read is to let someone else work for you — the most delicate form of exploitation.

• To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.

• Who does not believe in Fate proves that he has not lived.

• To be or not to be...Neither one nor the other.

• Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

• If I were asked to summarize as briefly as possible my vision of things, to reduce it to its most succinct expression, I should replace words with an exclamation point, a definitive !

• One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.

• Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.

• Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.

• What is marvelous is that each day brings us a new reason to disappear.

• Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?

• The need to devour oneself absolves one of the need to believe.

• To have grazed every form of failure, including success.

• Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes — desertion after desertion.

• One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.

• Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!

• When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.

• The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy.

• If you don't want to explode with rage, leave your memory alone, abstain from burrowing there.

• In order to deceive melancholy, you must keep moving. Once you stop, it wakens, if in fact it has ever dozed off.

• What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.

• By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

• Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?

• The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it. Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?

• Without will, no conflict: no tragedy among the abulic. Yet the failure of will can be experienced more painfully than a tragic destiny.

• To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!

Quotes about Cioran

• As an aphorist, Cioran has no rivals other than perhaps Nietzsche, and many of his philosophies are echoed by Ligotti. But Ligotti is far more disturbing than Cioran, who is actually very funny. In exploring these philosophies, nobody I've read has expressed the idea of humanity as aberration more powerfully than Cioran and Ligotti.
  • Nic Pizzolatto, as quoted by Michael Calia (2014) "Writer Nic Pizzolatto on Thomas Ligotti and the Weird Secrets of 'True Detective'", Speakeasy blog on the Wall Street Journal

• ...the greatest French writer to honour our language since the death of Paul Valery.
  • Saint-John Perse from "On the Heights of Despair"

• ...the most distinguished figure in the tradition since Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein.
  • Susan Sontag in "The Temptation to Exist"

• As Cioran correctly points out, a principal danger of being overcivilized is that one all too easily relapses, out of sheer exhaustion and the unsatisfied need to be "stimulated," into a vulgar and passive barbarism. Thus, "the man who unmasks his fictions" through an indiscriminate pursuit of the lucidity that is promoted by modern liberal culture "renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depth." There, he concludes, "no man concerned with his own equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis."
  • Susan Sontag, "'Thinking against oneself’: reflections on Cioran," Styles of Radical Will (New York: 1966), p. 85

See also

• Antinatalism
• Meaning of life
• Nihilism
• Philosophical pessimism
• Suicide
• Existentialism
• Misanthropy
• Despair, Suffering, Depression, Death
• Ecclesiastes