"When we have worn out the interest we once took in death, when we realize we have nothing more to gain from it, we fall back on birth, we turn to a much more inexhaustible abyss."
"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."
"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."
"I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if, creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentus 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 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."
"Not to have been born, merely musing on that-what happiness, what freedom, what space!"
"Have you suffered for knowledge? This is crucial, perhaps the sole question we should ask ourselves when we scrutinize anything, especially a thinker."
"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" [Cioran]
"each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me."
"It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late."
"What do you do from morning to night? I endure myself."
"I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies"
"Firsthand thinkers meditate upon things; the others upon problems. We must live face to face with being, and not with the mind."
"In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy."
"consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh."
"an existence constantly transfigured by failure"
"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 benn a matter of indifference to us."
"To realize, in rage and desolation alike, that nature...will not long grant us 'this morsel of matter she lends.'-This morsel of matter: by dint of pondering it we reach peace, though a peace it would be better never to have known."
"To be happy you must contanly bear in mind the miseries you have escaped. This would be a way for memory to redeem itself, since ordinarily it preserves only disasters, eager-and with what success!-to sabotage happiness."
"we have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Cioran
"And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth." [3]
"Ever since I was born"-that since has a resonance so dreadful to my ears it becomes unendurable.
"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 the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us."
"To have committed every crime but that of being a father"
"The disabused man is different: for him, disappointment occurs at the same time as the deed; he has no need to await it, it is present....when we perceive the end in the beginning, we move faster than time. Illumination, that lightning disappointment, affords certitude which transforms disillusion into deliverance. "
"Rare are the day when, projected into post-history, I fail to witness the gods' hilarity at leaving behind the human episode. What we need is an alternate vision, when that of the Last Judgment no longer satisfies anyone. "
"The real, the unique misfortune, to see the light of day..."
"Ever since I was born"-that since has a resonance so dreadful to my ears it becomes unendurable.
"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 the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us."
"To have committed every crime but that of being a father"
"The disabused man is different: for him, disappointment occurs at the same time as the deed; he has no need to await it, it is present....when we perceive the end in the beginning, we move faster than time. Illumination, that lightning disappointment, affords certitude which transforms disillusion into deliverance. "
"Rare are the day when, projected into post-history, I fail to witness the gods' hilarity at leaving behind the human episode. What we need is an alternate vision, when that of the Last Judgment no longer satisfies anyone. "
"The real, the unique misfortune, to see the light of day..."
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