Quotes from book
The Trouble With Being Born

Emil M. CioranOriginal title De l'inconvénient d'être né (French)
Emil M. Cioran photo

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born

Emil M. Cioran photo

“We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Emil M. Cioran photo

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

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born

Emil M. Cioran photo

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born

Emil M. Cioran photo

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

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Emil M. Cioran photo

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Emil M. Cioran photo

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Emil M. Cioran photo

“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!”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Emil M. Cioran photo

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

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Emil M. Cioran photo

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Emil M. Cioran photo

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Emil M. Cioran photo

“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?”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Emil M. Cioran photo

“The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity…”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Emil M. Cioran photo

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Emil M. Cioran photo

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Emil M. Cioran photo

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Emil M. Cioran photo

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Emil M. Cioran photo

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Emil M. Cioran photo

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Emil M. Cioran photo

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)