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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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