What will be the physiognomy of painting, of poetry, of music, in a hundred years? No one can tell. As after the fall of Athens, of Rome, a long pause will intervene, caused by the exhaustion of consciousness itself. Humanity, to rejoin the past, must invent a second naiveté, without which the arts can never begin again.- The Trouble with Being Born
In certain men, everything, absolutely everything, derives from physiology: their body is their mind, their mind is their body.
- The Trouble with Being Born
Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.
- The Trouble with Being Born
To stretch out in a field, to smell the earth and tell yourself it is the end as well as the hope of our dejections, that it would be futile to search for anything better to rest on, to dissolve into. .
- The Trouble with Being Born
Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.
- The Trouble with Being Born
Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
- Drawn and Quartered
Man is the great deserter of being.
- The Fall into Time
Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.
- The New Gods
From denial to denial, his existence is diminished: vaguer and more unreal than a syllogism of sighs, how could he still be a creature of flesh and blood? Anemic, he rivals the Idea itself; he has abstracted himself from his ancestors, from his friends, from every soul and himself; in his veins, once turbulent, rests a light from another world. Liberated from what he has lived, unconcerned by what he will live; he demolishes the signposts on all his roads, and wrests himself from the dials of all time. "I shall never meet myself again," he decides, happy to turn his last hatred against himself, happier still to annihilate--in his forgiveness--all beings, all things.
- A Short History of Decay
What life is left him robs him of what reason is left him. Trifles or scourges--the passing of a fly or the cramps of the planet--horrify him equally. With his nerves on fire, he would like the Earth to be made of glass, to shatter it to smithereens; and with what thirst would fling himself toward the stars to reduce them to powder, one by one.
- A Short History of Decay
If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.
- Tears and Saints
The only profitable conversations are with enthusiasts who have ceased being so—with the ex-naïve…Calmed down at last, they have taken, willy-nilly, the decisive step toward knowledge— that impersonal version of disappointment.
- Drawn and Quartered
As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.
- Tears and Saints
What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and consent to exist.
- Drawn and Quartered
My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.
- The Trouble with Being Born
We smile, because no answer is conceivable, because the answer would be even more meaningless than the question.
- The Trouble with Being Born
I feel I am free but I know I am not.
- The Trouble with Being Born
Cioran - Amazon UK
