Emil M. Cioran: Doing

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

“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.”

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

“Tears do not burn except in solitude.”

“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.”

“"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.”

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

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”