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The Trouble with Being Born QUOTES

The Trouble with Being Born QUOTES

1 " Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. "

― Emil M. Cioran , The Trouble with Being Born

2 " It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late. "

― Emil M. Cioran , The Trouble with Being Born

3 " Only god has the privilege of abandoning us. Men can only drop us "

― Emil M. Cioran , The Trouble with Being Born

4 " Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor. "

― Emil M. Cioran , The Trouble with Being Born

5 " Every phenomenon is a corrupt version of another, larger
phenomenon: time, a disease of eternity; history, a disease of
time; life, again, a disease of matter.
Then what is normal, what is healthy? Eternity? Which itself
is only an infirmity of God. "

― Emil M. Cioran , The Trouble with Being Born

6 " Our first intuitions are the true ones. "

― Emil M. Cioran , The Trouble with Being Born

7 " 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. "

― Emil M. Cioran , The Trouble with Being Born

8 " There is no false sensation. "

― Emil M. Cioran , The Trouble with Being Born

9 " Fanaticism is the death of conversation. We do not gossip with a candidate for martyrdom. What are we to say to someone who refuses to penetrate our reasons and who, the moment we do not bow to his, would rather die than yield? Give us dilettantes and sophists, who at least espouse all reasons... "

― Emil M. Cioran , The Trouble with Being Born

10 " It has been a long time since philosophers have read men’s souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us. "

― Emil M. Cioran , The Trouble with Being Born

11 " Les mystiques et leurs «  œuvres  complètes ». Quand on s'adresse à Dieu, et à Dieu seul, comme ils le prétendent, on devrait se garder d'écrire. Dieu ne lit pas... "

― Emil M. Cioran , The Trouble with Being Born

12 " Dans les époques de stérilité, on devrait hiberner, dormir jour et nuit pour conserver ses forces, au lieu de les dépenser en mortifications et en rages. "

― Emil M. Cioran , The Trouble with Being Born

13 " To be objective is to treat others as you treat an object, a corpse - to behave with them like an undertaker. "

― Emil M. Cioran , The Trouble with Being Born

14 " When, getting too used to ourselves, we begin to loathe ourselves, we soon realize that we are worse off, that self-hatred actually strengthens self-attachment. "

― Emil M. Cioran , The Trouble with Being Born

15 " A man who survives himself despises himself without acknowledging as much, sometimes without even knowing as much. "

― Emil M. Cioran , The Trouble with Being Born

16 " To shake people up, to wake them from their sleep, while knowing you are committing a crime and that it would be a thousand times better to leave them alone, since when they wake, too, you have nothing to offer them.... "

― Emil M. Cioran , The Trouble with Being Born

17 " Anyone may now and then have the sense of occupying only a point and a moment; to have such a sense day and night, hour by hour, is less frequent, and it is from this experience, this datum, that one turns toward nirvana or sarcasm--or toward both at once. "

― Emil M. Cioran , The Trouble with Being Born

18 " If it is true that by death we once more become what we were before being, would it not have been better to abide by that pure possibility, not to stir from it? What use was this detour, when we might have remained forever in an unrealized plenitude? "

― Emil M. Cioran , The Trouble with Being Born

19 " The notion that it would have been better never to exist is among those which meet with the most opposition. Every man, incapable of seeing himself except from inside, regards himself as necessary, even indispensable, every man feels and perceives himself as an absolute reality, as a whole, as the whole. The moment we identify ourselves entirely with our being, we react like God, we are God.
It is only when we live at once within and on the margins of ourselves that we can conceive, quite calmly, that it would have been preferable that the accident we are should never have occurred. "

― Emil M. Cioran , The Trouble with Being Born

20 " 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 elsewhere, and I don’t know where that elsewhere is. "

― Emil M. Cioran , The Trouble with Being Born