Author: Sineokov

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abstention

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 the action and not in abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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it would be futile to search for anything better to rest on

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. . . .

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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irrevocable

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, The Trouble With Being Born

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Self-knowledge

Self-knowledge — the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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“Self-knowledge”?

Once we appeal to our most intimate selves, once we begin to labor and to produce, we lay claim to gifts, we become unconscious of our own gaps. No one is in a position to admit that what comes out of his own depths might be worthless. “Self-knowledge”? A contradiction in terms.

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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How self-focused is self-knowledge?

But how self-focused is self-knowledge? Paradoxically, self-knowledge cannot be gained but through others. Thus in Plato, one’s beloved supplies a window into the self, the self one sees mirrored in the adoring looks of one’s beloved. But that only underscores the paradox of self-knowledge, which is never simply knowledge of the self, but of the self in relation to others.

— Andrew Schultz

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The mind’s self-defense mechanism

At the climax of failure, at the moment when shame is about to do us in, suddenly we are swept away by a frenzy of pride which lasts only long enough to drain us, to leave us without energy, to lower, with our powers, the intensity of our shame.

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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to resist some sudden resolution

More than once I have managed to leave my room, for if I had stayed there I could not be sure of being able to resist some sudden resolution. The street is more reassuring, you think less about yourself there, there everything weakens and wilts, beginning with your own confusion.

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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Subjective truth

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.

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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congenital perplexity

The mind that puts everything in question reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, know from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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fear of being surprised by the worst

Having lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to a get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born