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There is much speaking about Emil Cioran in Thomas Ligotti and Matt Cardin essays.
Good. What it is not so good is the quality and the depth of your understanding of Cioran.
Not the understanding of the works of Cioran but of Cioran, the human being. I have a
simple question to Matt Cardin: beside the faux stand-up comedy nihilism and the
slippery show-offnes of "Emile M." Cioran, can you tell me the names of the two major
Christian figures for whom Cioran was forever in debt and to whom he will return until
the end of his life?
A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and it's tomb.
Emile M. Cioran
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the
poet's equal there.
Emile M. Cioran
For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an
illusion.
Emile M. Cioran
Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.
Emile M. Cioran
I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
Emile M. Cioran
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
Emile M. Cioran
If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
Emile M. Cioran
In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
Emile M. Cioran
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
Emile M. Cioran
It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
Emile M. Cioran
Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
Emile M. Cioran
Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with
epilepsy.
Emile M. Cioran
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
Emile M. Cioran
My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is
among murderers.
Emile M. Cioran
No human beings are more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great
persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the
appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.
Emile M. Cioran
No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great
persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the
appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.
Emile M. Cioran
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
Emile M. Cioran
Not to be obliged, like so many others, to choose between the insipid and the atrocious.
Emile M. Cioran
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our
fatherland - and no other.
Emile M. Cioran
Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.
Emile M. Cioran
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
Emile M. Cioran
Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
Emile M. Cioran
Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
Emile M. Cioran
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
Emile M. Cioran
Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot
open his mouth.
Emile M. Cioran
The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even
death.
Emile M. Cioran
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
Emile M. Cioran
The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed
for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.
Emile M. Cioran
The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
Emile M. Cioran
The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.
Emile M. Cioran
The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
Emile M. Cioran
The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.
Emile M. Cioran
The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the
preposterous.
Emile M. Cioran
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and
whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
Emile M. Cioran
To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to
envy.
Emile M. Cioran
Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
Emile M. Cioran
Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.
Emile M. Cioran
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.
Emile M. Cioran
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
Emile M. Cioran
What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.
Emile M. Cioran
Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor
turned slave.
Emile M. Cioran
Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
Emile M. Cioran
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide
to anyone.
Emile M. Cioran
“Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare
confide to anyone.”
I Like this quote I dislike this quote“No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.”
I Like this quote I dislike this quote“A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are
destroyed.”
I Like this quote I dislike this quote“Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman
who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.”
I Like this quote I dislike this quote“The beauty of flames lies in their strange play,
beyond all proportion and harmony. Their diaphanous flare symbolizes at once grace and
tragedy, innocence and despair, sadness and voluptuousness. The burning transcendence
has something of the lightness of great purifications. I wish the fiery transcendence would
carry me up and throw me into a sea of flames, where, consumed by their delicate and
insidious tongues, I would die an ecstatic death. The beauty of flames creates the illusion
of a pure, sublime death similar to the light of dawn. Immaterial, death in flames is like a
burning of light, graceful wings. Do only butterflies die in flames? What about those
devoured by the flames within them?”
sixsixsick
I Like this quote I dislike this quote“You are done for - a living dead man - not when
you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the
"mystery" of life.”
I Like this quote I dislike this quote“The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.”
teardrop
I Like this quote I dislike this quote“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since
you always kill yourself too late.”
I Like this quote I dislike this quote“Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to
understand others but to understand ourselves.”
Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest
action untainted by evil.
-
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
-
Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we
exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.
-
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
-
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.
-
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
-
You are done for--a living dead man--not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred
preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the "mystery" of life.
-
From denial to denial, his existence is diminished: vaguer and more unreal than a
syllogism of sighs, how could he still be a creature of flesh and blood? Anemic, he rivals
the Idea itself; he has abstracted himself from his ancestors, from his friends, from every
soul and himself; in his veins, once turbulent, rests a light from another world. Liberated
from what he has lived, unconcerned by what he will live; he demolishes the signposts on
all his roads, and wrests himself from the dials of all time. "I shall never meet myself
again," he decides, happy to turn his last hatred against himself, happier still to
annihilate--in his forgiveness--all beings, all things.
- A Short History of Decay
Our contortions, visible or secret, we communicate to the planet; already it trembles even
as we do, it suffers the contagion of our crises and, as this grand mal spreads, it vomits us
forth, cursing us the while.
- Drawn and Quartered
Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it
exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't
live in time, in fact they never have.
- The New Gods
Man is unacceptable.
- The Trouble with Being Born
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.
- The Trouble with Being Born
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.
- The Trouble with Being Born
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide
to anyone.
- The Trouble with Being Born
Life is nothing; death, everything. Yet there is nothing which is death, independent of life.
It is precisely this absence of autonomous, distinct reality which makes death universal; it
has no realm of its own, it is omnipresent, like everything which lacks identity, limit, and
bearing: an indecent infinitude.
- The Trouble with Being Born
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.
- The Trouble with Being Born
It is because of speech that men give the illusion of being free. By speaking, they deceive
themselves, as they deceive others: because they say what they are going to do, who
could suspect they are not masters of their actions?
- The Trouble with Being Born
The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
- The Trouble with Being Born
Each time you find yourself at a turning point, the best thing is to lie down and let hours
pass. Resolutions made standing up are worthless: they are dictated either by pride or by
fear. Prone, we still know these two scourges, but in a more attenuated, more intemporal
form.
- The Trouble with Being Born
I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made
existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one
day, one year to the next.
- The Trouble with Being Born
Utopia is the grotesque en rose, the need to associate happiness -- that is, the improbable
-- with becoming, and to coerce an optimistic, aerial vision to the point where it rejoins
its own source: the very cynicism it sought to combat. In short, a monstrous fantasy.
Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with
petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.
If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none
of us would utter an 'I' without shame.
I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass--which is better than trying to fill them.
- in the London "Guardian" [Laziness]
• No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the
great persecutors... More
• The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself
killed for... More
• Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The
proudest... More
• Afflicted with existence, each man endures like an animal the consequences
which proceed from it.... More
• Those who believe in their truth—the only ones whose imprint is retained by the
memory of... More
Those who believe in their truth—the only ones whose imprint is retained by the memory
of men—leave the earth behind them strewn with corpses. Religions number in their
ledgers more murders than the bloodiest tyrannies account for, and those whom humanity
has called divine far surpass the most conscientious murderers in their thirst for slaughter.
- E.M. Cioran Attribution: E.M. Cioran (b. 1911), Rumanian–born-French philosopher.
“Itinerary of Hate,” ch. 1, A Short History of Decay (1949).
• One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our...
More
• A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to
essentials: it... More
• Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he
becomes no more... More
• Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to
understand ourselves. More
• Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my
parents had not... More
• A sensation must have fallen very low to deign to turn into an idea. More
• Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an
even footing... More
• Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness. More
• A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting
it, loses its... More
• We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of
someday meeting someone... More
• Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who
cannot open his mouth. More
• Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment. More
• You are done for—a living dead man—not when you stop loving but stop hating.
Hatred... More
• What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that
man has always... More
• There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be. More
• Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in
company. No... More
• To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten. More
• The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves
as the center,... More
• Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the
slightest action... More
• A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed. More
• Negation is the mind’s first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long
as we exert... More
• Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent—unwilling either to
assimilate or to... More
• We derive our vitality from our store of madness. More
• A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the
uniformity of their... More
A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of
their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom
unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from
fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends,
only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against
inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony,
man alone wants something to happen at all costs—something, anything.... Thereby he
shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an
alienated gorilla. - E.M. Cioran
Attribution: E.M. Cioran (b. 1911), Rumanian–born French philosopher. The Trouble
with Being Born, ch. 11, trans. by Richard Howard, Seaver Books (1976).
• It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too
late. More
• Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation. More
• Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
More
• Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh. More
• God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
More
• Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need
for them and... More
• If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot. More
• To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring. More
• Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested
in other... More
Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other
people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our
murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish. - E.M. Cioran
Attribution: E.M. Cioran (b. 1911), Romanian–born French philosopher. Title essay, The
Temptation to Exist (1956).
E. M. CioranE. M. Cioran
Category: Philosophy
Wikipedia entry
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Page 1 of 7
A conscious fruit fly would have to confront exactly the same difficulties, the kind of
insoluble problems as man.
E.M. Cioran
All these poems where it is merely the Poem that is in question - a whole poetry with no
other substance than itself! What would we say of a prayer whose object was religion?
E.M. Cioran
A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of his
talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.
E.M. Cioran
At this precise moment, no reproach proceeding from men or gods can affect me: I have
as good a conscience as if I had never existed.
E.M. Cioran
Beware of euphemisms! They aggravate the horror they are supposed to disguise.
E.M. Cioran
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?
E.M. Cioran
Dialogue becomes pointless with someone who escapes the procession of the years. I ask
those I love to be kind enough to grow old.
E.M. Cioran
Each opinion, each view is necessarily partial, truncated, inadequate. In philosophy and
in anything, originality comes down to incomplete definitions.
E.M. Cioran
Each time Time torments me, I tell myself that one of us must back down, that it is
impossible for this cruel confrontation to go on indefinitely.
E.M. Cioran
E. M. CioranE. M. Cioran
Category: Philosophy
Wikipedia entry
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Page 2 of 7
Having always lived in fear of being suprised by the worst, I have tried in every
circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.
E.M. Cioran
How can you control yourself, master your behavior, when you come from a country
where people howl at funerals?
E.M. Cioran
Humanity, to rejoin the past, must invent a second naivete, without which the arts can
never begin again.
E.M. Cioran
I do nothing, granted. But I see hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.
E.M. Cioran
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?
E.M. Cioran
If disgust for the world conferred sanctity of itself, I fail to see how I could avoid
canonization.
E.M. Cioran
Page 3 of 7
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
E.M. Cioran
I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by
resembling my latest enemy.
E.M. Cioran
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.
E.M. Cioran
In art and in everything, the commentator is generally better informed and more lucid
than the subject of commentary. This is the advantage the murderer has over his victim.
E.M. Cioran
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.
E.M. Cioran
I supressed word after word from my vocabulary. When the massacre was over, only one
had escaped: Solitude. I awakened euphoric.
E.M. Cioran
I think of so many friends 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.
E.M. Cioran
Man accepts death but not the hour of his death. To die any time, except when one has to
die!
E.M. Cioran
Page 4 of 7
Never judge a man without putting yourself in his place. This old proverb makes all
judgement impossible, for we judge someone only because, in fact, we cannot put
ourselves in his place.
E.M. Cioran
No true art without a strong dose of banality. The constant employment of the
unaccustomed readily wearies us, nothing being more unendurable than the uniformity of
the exceptional.
E.M. Cioran
Only God has the privilege of abandoning us. Men can only drop us.
E.M. Cioran
Paradise was the place where everything was known but where nothing was explained.
The universe before sin - before commentary...
E.M. Cioran
She meant absolutely nothing to me. Realizing, suddenly, after so many years, that
whatever happens I shall never see her again, I nearly collapsed. We understand what
death is only by suddenly remembering the face of someone who has been a matter of
indifference to us.
E.M. Cioran
Since we remember only our ordeals, it is ultimately the sick, the persecuted, the victims
in every realm who will have lived to the best advantage. The others - the lucky ones -
have a life, of course, but not the memory of a life.
E.M. Cioran
The final step toward indifference is the destruction of the very notion of indifference.
E.M. Cioran
The intrinsic value of a book does not depend on the importance of its subject (else the
theologians would prevail, and mightily), but on the manner of approaching the
accidental and the insignificant, of mastering the infinitesimal. The essential has never
required the least talent.
E.M. Cioran
Page 5 of 7
The mystics and their collected works. When one addresses oneself to God, and to God
alone, as they claim to do, one should be careful not to write. God doesn't read...
E.M. Cioran
The not at all negligible advantage of having greatly hated men is that one comes to
endure them by the exhaustion of this very hatred.
E.M. Cioran
The one sincere confession is the one we make indirectly - when we talk about other
people.
E.M. Cioran
The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as
qualified to talk about them.
E.M. Cioran
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.
E.M. Cioran
Time, fertile in resources, more inventive and more charitable than we think, posesses a
remarkable capacity to help us out, to afford us at any hour of the day some new
humiliation.
E.M. Cioran
To shake people up, to wake them from their sleep, while knowing you are committing a
crime and that it would be a thousand times better to leave them alone, since when they
wake, too, you have nothing to offer them...
E.M. Cioran
Page 6 of 7
We do not envy those who have the capacity to pray, whereas we are filled with envy of
the possessors of goods, of those who know wealth and fame. Strange that we resign
ourselves to someone's salvation and not to what fugitive advantages he may enjoy.
E.M. Cioran
We forgive only madmen and children for being frank with us: others, if they have the
audacity to imitate them, will regret it sooner or later.
E.M. Cioran
We must beware of whatever insights we have into ourselves. Our self-knowledge annoys
and paralyzes our daimon - this is where we should look for the reason Socrates wrote
nothing.
E.M. Cioran
We should have been excused from lugging a body: the burden of the self was enough.
E.M. Cioran
What a disappointment that Epicurus, the sage I most need, should have written over
three hundred treatises! And what a relief that they are lost!
E.M. Cioran
What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor
of verification.
E.M. Cioran
What is known as wisdom is ultimately only a perpetual thinking it over, i.e., non-action
as first impulse.
E.M. Cioran
What other people do we always feel we could do better. Unfortunately we do not have
the same feeling about what we ourselves do.
E.M. Cioran
Page 7 of 7
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.
E.M. Cioran
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide
to anyone.
E.M. Cioran
Years now without coffee, without alcohol, without tobacco. ...Luckily, there is anxiety,
which usefully replaces the strongest stimulants.
E.M. Cioran
In certain men, everything, absolutely everything, derives from physiology: their body is
their mind, their mind is their body.
- The Trouble with Being Born
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.
- The Trouble with Being Born
To stretch out in a field, to smell the earth and tell yourself it is the end as well as the
hope of our dejections, that it would be futile to search for anything better to rest on, to
dissolve into. .
- The Trouble with Being Born
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.
- The Trouble with Being Born
Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it
exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't
live in time, in fact they never have.
- The New Gods
From denial to denial, his existence is diminished: vaguer and more unreal than a
syllogism of sighs, how could he still be a creature of flesh and blood? Anemic, he rivals
the Idea itself; he has abstracted himself from his ancestors, from his friends, from every
soul and himself; in his veins, once turbulent, rests a light from another world. Liberated
from what he has lived, unconcerned by what he will live; he demolishes the signposts on
all his roads, and wrests himself from the dials of all time. "I shall never meet myself
again," he decides, happy to turn his last hatred against himself, happier still to
annihilate--in his forgiveness--all beings, all things.
- A Short History of Decay
Cut off from every root, unfit, moreover to mix with dust or mud, we have achieved the
feat of breaking not only with the depth of things, but their very surface.- "Civilized
Man"
What life is left him robs him of what reason is left him. Trifles or scourges--the passing
of a fly or the cramps of the planet--horrify him equally. With his nerves on fire, he
would like the Earth to be made of glass, to shatter it to smithereens; and with what thirst
would fling himself toward the stars to reduce them to powder, one by one.
- A Short History of Decay
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.
- Tears and Saints
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.
- Drawn and Quartered
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.
- Tears and Saints
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.
- Drawn and Quartered
My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them,
expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.
- The Trouble with Being Born
We smile, because no answer is conceivable, because the answer would be even more
meaningless than the question.
- The Trouble with Being Born