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Virtue’s intolerance

It is easier to get on with vices than with virtues. The vices, accommodating by nature, help each other, are full of mutual indulgence, whereas the jealous virtues combat and annihilate each other, showing in everything their incompatibility and their intolerance.

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

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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