E. M. Cioran

(1911–1995)

Cioran was a Romanian philosopher who lived most of his life in Paris. He is the author of many books—essays and aphorisms.

Selections from:

I - The Trouble with Being Born

II - Tears and Saints

III - Drawn and Quartered

I - The Trouble with Being Born

He who hates himself is not humble.

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

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.

Only what you hide is profound, is true.
Whence the power of base feelings.

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

If we could see ourselves as others see us,
we would vanish on the spot.

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

The wise man consents to everything, for he identifies
himself with nothing. An opportunist without desires.

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

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

Most of our troubles come from our first impulses.
The slightest enthusiasm costs more than a crime.

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

Fear creates consciousness—not natural fear but morbid fear.
Otherwise animals would have achieved a level
of consciousness higher than ours.

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

Nights when we have slept are as if they had never been.
The only ones that remain in our memory
are the ones when we couldn't close our eyes:
night means sleepless night.

There is no false sensation.

I believe with that madman Calvin that we are predestined
to salvation or damnation in our mother's womb.
We have already lived our life before being born.

I feel I am free but I know I am not.

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

A book is a postponed suicide.

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…

Innocence being the perfect state, perhaps the only one,
it is incomprehensible that a man enjoying it should seek to leave it.
Yet history from its beginnings down to ourselves
is only that and nothing but that.

Not the slightest trace of reality anywhere—
except in my sensations of unreality.

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.

Rather in a gutter than on a pedestal.

To express an obsession is to project it outside yourself,
to hunt it down, to exorcise it.
Obsessions are the demons of a world without faith.

Deep in his heart, man aspires to rejoin the condition he had before
consciousness. History is merely the detour he takes to get there.

We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

Once the animals no longer need to fear each other, they fall into
a daze and take on that dumbfounded look they have in zoos.
Individuals and nations would afford the same spectacle
if some day they managed to live in harmony,
no longer trembling openly or in secret.

We pursue whatever we pursue out of torment—a need for torment.
Our very quest for salvation is a torment, the subtlest,
the best camouflaged of all.

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

That faint light in each of us which dates back to before our
birth, to before all births, is what must be protected if we want
to rejoin that remote glory from which we shall never know why
we were separated.

In a work of psychiatry, only the patients' remarks interest me;
in a work of criticism, only the quotations.

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

I have no faith, luckily.
If I had, I should live in constant fear of losing it.
Hence, far from helping me, it would do nothing but injure me.

We smile, because no answer is conceivable,
because the answer would be even more
meaningless than the question.

God: a disease we imagine we are cured of
because no one dies of it nowadays.

The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money,
reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession,
thereby sinking as low as the rich.

No one approaches the condition of a sage if he has not had the good luck to be forgotten in his lifetime.

A broadcast about wolves, with recordings of their howls.
What a language! The most heartrending I know,
and I shall never forget it.
From now on, in moments of excessive solitude,
I need merely recall those sounds to have
the sense of belonging to a community.

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

II - Tears and Saints

Neither mystics nor saints need eyes;
they don't look at the world.
Their heart is their eye.

My Lord, without you I'm mad,
and with you I shall go mad!

Paganism is the deepening of appearances,
while saintliness is the sickness of depths.

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

Only paradise or the sea could make me give up music.

To fear is to die every minute.

A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.

Could God be just a fashion of the soul,
a fleeting passion of history?

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

Only light souls can be saved:
those whose weight will not break the wings of angels.

We are the wounds of nature…

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

Sadness begins on this side of creation,
where God has never been.
For, confronted with the human heart,
how could he have maintained his poise?

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

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

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.

While men are haunted by the memory of paradise,
angels are tormented by longing for this world.

Saintliness is a celestial vice.

Oppressed by the solitude of matter,
God has shed oceans of tears.
Hence the sea's mysterious appeal,
and our longing to drown in it,
like a short cut to him through his tears.
He who has not shed tears on every seashore
has not know the troubling vicinity of God,
that solitude which forces upon us an even greater one.

Sadness makes you God's prisoner.

Without their madness, saints would merely be Christians.

I wish my heart were an organ pipe,
and I the translator of God's silences.

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

Man has played hooky from nature.
His successful evasion is his tragedy.

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.

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.

Such fierce longing to press God on my heart
as if he were a loved one in the throes of agony,
to beg of him one last proof of his love
only to find myself with his corpse in my arms!

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.

III - Drawn and Quartered

To be is to be cornered.

We should change our name after each important experience.

Only a flower that falls is a complete flower, say the Japanese.
One is tempted to say as much of a civilization.

Doubt works deep within you like a disease or,
even more effectively, like a faith.

A young man and a young woman, both mutes, speaking to one
another by gestures. How happy they both looked!
All the evidence suggests that speech is not,
and cannot be, the vehicle of happiness.

One clings to trifles in order not to realize what they conceal,
one deceives nothingness by something even more null and void.

The only profitable conversations are with enthusiasts who
have ceased being so—with the ex-naïve…
Calmed down at last, they have taken, willy-nilly,
the decisive step toward knowledge—
that impersonal version of disappointment.

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

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

However far one may have advanced, one still drags along
the indignity of being—or of having been—human.

Friendship is a pact, a convention.
Two beings tacitly promise never to broadcast
what each really thinks of the other.
A kind of alliance based on compromises.
When one of them publicly calls
attention to the other's defects,
the pact is declared null and void,
the alliance broken.
No friendship lasts if one of the partners
ceases to play the game.
In other words, no friendship tolerates
an exaggerated proportion of honesty.

Eternity is absence.

For life is a vice—the greatest one of all.

When I happen to be satisfied with everything,
even with 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 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 consent to exist.

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

To think is to run after insecurity…
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?

Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man.

Everyone is mistaken, everyone lives in illusion.
At best, we can admit a scale of fictions,
a hierarchy of unrealities…

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

Hope is the normal form of delirium.

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

It is not normal to be alive,
since the living being as such exists
and is real only when threatened.
Death in short is no more than the cessation of an anomaly.

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 only real dignity is that of exclusion.