Quotes

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Time, some new humiliation

Time, fertile in resources, more inventive and more charitable then we think, possesses a remarkable capacity to help us out, to afford us at any hour of the day some new humiliation.

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

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Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?

I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.

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

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the passion for being unproductive

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.

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

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Tone — making our organic pulsations felt

We say: he has no talent, only tone. But tone is precisely what cannot be invented — we’re born with it. Tone is an inherited grace, the privilege some of us have of making our organic pulsations felt — tone is more than talent, it is its essence.

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

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mechanicaly bestir

The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is somewhere else, and I don’t know what that elsewhere is.

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