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1 " If you try to convert someone, it will never be toeffect his salvation but to make him suffer like yourself,to be sure he is exposed to the same ordeals andendures them with the same impatience. You keepwatch, you pray, you agonize-provided he does too,sighing, groaning, beset by the same tortures that areracking you. Intolerance is the work of ravaged soulswhose faith comes down to a more or less deliberatetorment they would like to see generalized, instituted.The happiness of others never having been a motiveor principle of action, it is invoked only to appeaseconscience or to parade noble excuses: whenever wedetermine upon an action, the impulse leading to itand forcing us to complete it is almost always inadmissible.No one saves anyone; for we save only ourselves,and do so all the better if we disguise asconvictions the misery we want to share, to lavish onothers. However glamorous its appearances, proselytismnonetheless derives from a suspect generosity,worse in its effects than a patent aggression. No oneis willing to endure alone the discipline he may evenhave assented to, nor the yoke he has shouldered.Vindication reverberates beneath the missionary'sbonhomie, the apostle's joy. We convert not to liberatebut to enchain.Once someone is shackled by a certainty, he enviesyour vague opinions, your resistance to dogmas orslogans, your blissful incapacity to commit yourself. "
― Emil M. Cioran , The Fall into Time
2 " Croire qu’il lui appartient de dépasser sa condition et de s’orienter vers celle de surhomme, c’est oublier qu’il a du mal à tenir le coup en tant qu’homme, et qu’il n’y parvient qu’à force de tendre sa volonté, son ressort, au maximum. "
3 " Zadarnic supunem universul și ni-l însușim, atâta vreme cât nu vom fi învins timpul vom rămâne doar niște sclavi. "
4 " If man is not ready to abdicate or to reconsider his case, it is because he has not yet drawn the final consequences of knowledge and of power. Convinced that his moment will come, that he will catch up with God and pass Him by, he clings—envious as he is—to the notion of evolution, as if the fact of advancing must necessarily bring him to the highest degree of perfection. Having sought to be other, he will end by being nothing; he is already nothing. Doubtless he is evolving, but against himself, to his cost, and toward a complexity which is ruining him. Becoming, progress: notions apparently tangential, actually divergent. True, everything changes, but rarely, if ever, for the better. Euphoric inflection of the original disease, of that false innocence which awakened in Adam a desire for the new, our faith in evolution, in the identity of becoming and progress, will collapse only when man, having reached the extremity of his distraction, having turned at last to the knowledge which leads to deliverance and not to power, will be in a position to offer an irrevocable no to his exploits and to his work. If he continues to clutch at them, he will doubtless enter upon the career of a ludicrous god or an obsolete animal, a solution as convenient as it is degrading, the ultimate stage of his infidelity to himself. Whatever choice he makes, and though he has not exhausted all the virtues of his failure, he has nonetheless fallen so low that it is hard to understand why he does not pray unceasingly, until his very voice and reason are extinguished. "
5 " And if Indifference fills him to overflowing, if he makes it into a reality as vast as the universe itself, it is because Indifference is the practical equivalent of doubt, and in his eyes does doubt not have the prestige of the Unconditioned? "
6 " What I discern in each moment is its exhaustion, its death-rattle, and not the transition to the next moment. I generate dead time, wallowing in the asphyxia of becoming. "
7 " A religion is nothing by itself; its fate depends on those who adopt it. The new gods demand new men, capable, in any circumstance, of decision, of choice, of saying firmly yes or no, instead of floundering in quibbles or becoming anemic by abuse of nuance. Since the virtues of barbarians consist precisely in the power of taking sides, of affirming or denying, they will always be celebrated by declining periods. The nostalgia for barbarism is the last word of a civilization; and thereby of skepticism. "
8 " A civilization begins by myth and ends in doubt; a theoretical doubt which, once it turns against itself, becomes quite practical. No civilization can begin by questioning values it has not yet created; once produced, it wearies of them and weans itself away, examines and weighs them with a devastating detachment.For the various beliefs it had engendered and which now break adrift, it substitutes a system of uncertainties, it organizes its metaphysical shipwreck with amazing success when a Sextus is on hand to help. "