Author: Sineokov

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The most effective way to avoid dejection

The most effective way to avoid dejection, motivated or gratuitous, is to take a dictionary, preferably of a language you scarcely know, and to look up word after word in it, making sure that they are the kind you will never use. . . .

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

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Imaginary pains

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.

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

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find words to express it

As long as you live on this side of the terrible, you will find words to express it; once you know it from inside, you will no longer find a single one.

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

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this morsel of matter

To realize, in rage and desolation alike, that nature, as Bossuet says, 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.

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

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Paradox is not suited to burials

Paradox is not suited to burials, nor to weddings or births, in fact. Sinister — or grotesque — events require commonplaces; the terrible, like the painful, accommodates only the cliche.

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

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The Aztecs were right

The Aztecs were right to believe the gods must be appeased, to offer them human blood every day in order to keep the universe from sinking back into chaos.

We long since ceased to believe in the gods, and we no longer offer them sacrifices. Yet the world is still here. No doubt. Only we no longer have the good luck to know why it does not collapse on the spot.

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

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Writing for gladiators

Think about those who haven’t long to live, who know that everything is over and done with, except the time in which the thought of their end unrolls. Deal with that time. Write for the gladiators. . . .

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

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Moral disintegration

Moral disintegration when we spend time in a place that is too beautiful: the self dissolves upon contact with paradise. No doubt it was to avoid this danger that the first man made the choice he did.

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

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the earth was falling through space and I was falling with it

We had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that the earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy.

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

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drive to distraction

A task to be done, something I have undertaken out of necessity or choice: no sooner have I started in than everything seems important, everything attracts me, except that.

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

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Particle is not the word

Why fear the nothing in store for us when it is no different from the nothing which preceded us: this argument of the Ancients against the fear of death is unacceptable as consolation. Before, we had the luck not to exist; now we exist, and it is this particle of existence, hence of misfortune, which dreads death. Particle is not the word, since each of us prefers himself to the universe, at any rate considers himself equal to it.

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

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If you are doomed to devour yourself

If you are doomed to devour yourself, nothing can keep you from it: a trifle will impel you as much as a tragedy. Resign yourself to erosion at all times: your fate wills it so.

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