Cioran & self

Cioran - Self

What sacrifice would I not make in order to be free of this wretched self, which at this very moment occupies, within the All, a place no god has dared aspire to!

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Self-knowledge—the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?

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I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.

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The only successful philosophies and religions are the ones that flatter us, whether in the name of progress or of hell Damned or not, man experiences an absolute need to be at the heart of everything. It is, in fact, solely for this reason that he is man, that he has become man.
And if some day he no longer feels this need, he must give way to some other animal prouder, madder than himself.

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Once we appeal to our most intimate selves, once we begin to labor and to produce, we lay claim to gifts, we become unconscious of our own gaps. No one is in a position to admit that what comes out of his own depths might be worthless. “Self-knowledge”? A contradiction in terms.

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Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that he alone pursues the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear.

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If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.

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The more laden he is with years, the more readily he speaks of his death as a distant, quite unlikely event. Life is now such a habit that he has become unfit for death.

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We forgive only madmen and children for being frank with us: others, if they have the audacity to imitate them, will regret it sooner or later.

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A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of his talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.

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The stoic’s maxim, according to which we should submit uncomplainingly to things which do not depend on ourselves, takes into account only external misfortunes, which escape our will. But how to accommodate ourselves to those which come from ourselves? If we are the source of our ills, whom are we to confront?
Ourselves? We manage, luckily, to forget that we are the guilty parties, and moreover existence is tolerable only if we daily renew this lie, this act of oblivion.

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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.

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I know peace only when my ambitions sleep. Once they waken, anxiety repossesses me. Life is a state of ambition. The mole digging his tunnels Is ambitious.
Ambition is in effect everywhere, and we see its traces on the faces of the dead themselves.

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When I was young, no pleasure compared with the pleasure of making enemies. Now, whenever I make one, my first thought is to be reconciled, so that I won’t have to bother about him. Having enemies is a heavy responsibility. My burden is sufficient, I no longer can carry that of others as well.

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Even in God’s company, discontent was brewing, as the revolt of the angels testifies—the first on record.
Apparently on every level of creation, no one is forgiven his superiority. We might even conceive of an envious flower.

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“… the feeling of being everything and the evidence of being nothing.” I happened across this phrase in my youth, and was overwhelmed by it. Everything I felt in those days, and everything I would feel from then on, was summed up in this eitraordinary banal formula, the synthesis of expansion and failure, ecstasy and impasse.
Most often it is not in a paradox but in a truism that a revelation appears.

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The pangs of truth about ourselves are more than we can endure. How pitiable the man (if such a being exists) who no longer lies to himself!

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I shall no longer read the sages—they have done me too much harm. I should have surrendered to my instincts, let my madness flourish. I have done just the opposite, I have put on the mask of reason, and the mask has ended by replacing my face and usurping all the rest.

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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 own 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.

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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.

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In Turin, at the beginning of his madness, Nietzsche would rush to his mirror, look at himself, turn away, look again. In the train that was taking him to Basel, the one thing he always asked for was a mirror. He no longer knew who he was, kept looking for himself, and this man, so eager to protect his identity, so thirsty for himself, had no instrument at hand but the clumsiest, the most lamentable of expedients.

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Two friends, both actresses in a country of eastern Europe. One decamps to the West, becoming rich and famous there; the other remains where she is, poor and obscure. Half a century later, the second woman takes a trip and pays a visit to her fortunate colleague. “She used to be a head taller than me, and now she’s a shrunken old woman, and paralyzed into the bargain.” Other details follow, and in conclusion: “I’m not afraid of death; I’m afraid of death in life.” Nothing like recourse to philosophical reflection to camouflage a belated revenge.

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Friendship has scope and interest only for the young. For an older person, it is apparent that what he dreads most is being survived by his friends.

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As memory weakens, the praise that has been lavished upon us fades, too, to the advantage of the censure. And this is just: the praise has rarely been deserved, whereas the censure sheds a certain light on what we did not know about ourselves.

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We hate ourselves because we cannot forget ourselves, because we cannot think of anything else. It is inevitable that we should be exasperated by this excessive preference and that we should struggle to triumph over it. Yet hating ourselves is the least effective stratagem by which to manage it.

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Everything that inconveniences us allows us to define ourselves. Without indispositions, no identity — the luck and misfortune of a conscious organism.

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I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.
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...so tenacious is the old Adam in us, the bustling canaille, unfit for self-effacement.
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I am enraptured by Hindu philosophy, whose essential endeavor is to surmount the self; and everything I do, everything I think is only myself and the selfs humiliations.
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At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.
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Though we may prefer ourselves to the universe, we nonetheless loathe ourselves much more than we suspect. If the wise man is so rare a phenomenon, it is because he seems unshaken by the aversion which, like all beings, he must feel for himself.
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X insults me. I am about to hit him. Thinking it over, I refrain.
Who am I? which is my real self: the self of the retort or that of the refraining? My first reaction is always energetic; the second one, flabby. What is known as “wisdom” is ultimately only a perpetual “thinking it over,” i.e., non-action as first impulse.
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The only successful philosophies and religions are the ones that flatter us, whether in the name of progress or of hell Damned or not, man experiences an absolute need to be at the heart of everything. It is, in fact, solely for this reason that he is man, that he has become man. And if some day he no longer feels this need, he must give way to some other animal prouder, madder than himself.
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Once we appeal to our most intimate selves, once we begin to labor and to produce, we lay claim to gifts, we become unconscious of our own gaps. No one is in a position to admit that what comes out of his own depths might be worthless. “Self-knowledge”? A contradiction in terms.
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“What do you do from morning to night?” “I endure myself.”
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Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that he alone pursues the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear.
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Self-knowledge—the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?
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If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
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The one sincere confession is the one we make indirectly—when we talk about other people.
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What other people do we always feel we could do better. Unfortunately we do not have the same feeling about what we ourselves do.
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“I was the Prophet,” Mohammed informs us, “when Adam was still between the water and the clay.” … When we have not had the pride to found a religion—or at least to destroy one—how do we dare show ourselves in the light of day?
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We forgive only madmen and children for being frank with us: others, if they have the audacity to imitate them, will regret it sooner or later.
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X, whom I have always treated as badly as I could, does not resent me because he resents no one. He forgives every insult, he even forgets them. How I envy him! To be like him, I should have to live through several existences and exhaust all my possibilities of transmigration.
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We have spent a little over an hour together. He has used the time to show off, and by dint of trying to say interesting things about himself, has succeeded. If he had merely swaggered in moderation, I should have found him a bore and left in a few minutes. By exaggerating, by playing the peacock to perfection, he has come close enough to wit to show some. The desire to appear subtle does not destroy subtlety. A mental defective, if he could feel the longing to astonish, would manage to deceive us—would even catch up with intelligence.
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X, who is older than the patriarchs, after inveighing, during a long tête-à-tête, against this one and that, tells me: “The great weakness of my life is that I’ve never hated anyone.” Our hatred does not diminish with the years: in fact, it mounts. That of an old man like X attains incredible proportions: now insensitive to his former affections, he puts all his faculties at the service of his rancors which, miraculously reinvigorated, will survive the crumbling of his memory and even of his reason.
… The danger of frequenting the old is that when we find them so far from detachment and so incapable of espousing it, we arrogate to ourselves all the advantages they are supposed to have and do not. And it is inevitable that our real or imaginary advance upon them in matters of weariness or disgust should incite to presumption.
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Anyone who gives himself up to writing believes—without realizing the fact—that his work will survive the years, the ages, time itself. … If he felt, while he was at work on it, that it was perishable, he would leave off where he was, he could never finish. Activity and credulity are correlative terms.
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We must beware of whatever insights we have into ourselves. Our self-knowledge annoys and paralyzes our daimon—this is where we should look for the reason Socrates wrote nothing.
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Tertullian tells us that in order to be cured, epileptics would go “and greedily suck the blood of criminals slaughtered in the arena.” If I were to heed my instinct, this would be the one type of medication, no matter what the disease, which I would adopt.
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Two enemies—the same man divided.
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“Never judge a man without putting yourself in his place.” This old proverb makes all judgment impossible, for we judge someone only because, in fact, we cannot put ourselves in his place.
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“Truth remains hidden to the man filled with desire and hatred” (Buddha)…. Which is to say, to every man alive.
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“An enemy is as useful as a Buddha.” Exactly, for our enemy watches over us, keeps us from letting ourselves go. By indicating, by divulging our least weakness, he leads us straight to our salvation, moves heaven and earth to keep us from being unworthy of his image of us. Hence our gratitude to him should be boundless.
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Self-pity is not so sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker’s attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!
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The more gifted a man is, the less progress he makes on the spiritual level. Talent is an obstacle to the inner life.
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When someone tells us of an unfavorable opinion about ourselves, instead of being distressed, we should think of all the “evil” we have spoken of others, and realize that it is only justice that as much should be said of ourselves. Ironically, no one is more vulnerable, more susceptible, and less likely to acknowledge his own defects than the backbiter. Merely tell him about the slightest reservation someone has made in his regard, and he will lose countenance, lose his temper, and drown in his own bile.
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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.
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Gogol, in hopes of a “regeneration,” journeys to Nazareth and discovers he is as bored there as “in a Russian railroad station”—this is what happens to us all when we look outside ourselves for what can exist only inside.
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Kill yourself because you are what you are, yes, but not because all humanity would spit in your face!
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The certainty of being only an accident has accompanied me on all occasions, propitious or injurious, and if it has saved me from the temptation to believe myself necessary, it has not on the other hand entirely cured me of a certain vainglory inherent in the loss of illusions.

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I know peace only when my ambitions sleep. Once they waken, anxiety repossesses me. Life is a state of ambition. The mole digging his tunnels Is ambitious. Ambition is in effect everywhere, and we see its traces on the faces of the dead themselves.
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X, whom I do not particularly appreciate, was telling a story so stupid that I wakened with a start: those we don’t like rarely shine in our dreams.
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Painful or wounding questions asked by the uncouth distress and anger us, and may have the same effect as certain techniques of Oriental meditation. Who knows if a dense, aggressive stupidity might not provoke illumination? It is certainly worth as much as a rap on the head with a stick.
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The man of the Rubicon, after Pharsalus, had forgiven too many. Such magnanimity seemed offensive to those of his friends who had betrayed him and whom he had humiliated by treating them without rancor. They felt diminished, flouted, and punished him for his clemency or for his disdain: he had refused to stoop to resentment! Had he behaved as a tyrant, they would have spared him. But they could not forgive him, since he had not deigned to frighten them enough.
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We invest ourselves with an abusive superiority when we tell someone what we think of him and of what he does. Frankness is not compatible with a delicate sentiment, nor even with an ethical exigency.
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When I was young, no pleasure compared with the pleasure of making enemies. Now, whenever I make one, my first thought is to be reconciled, so that I won’t have to bother about him. Having enemies is a heavy responsibility. My burden is sufficient, I no longer can carry that of others as well.
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To express an obsession is to project it outside yourself, to hunt it down, to exorcise it. Obsessions are the demons of a world without faith.
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Each generation lives in the absolute: it behaves as if it had reached the apex if not the end of history.
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Any and every nation, at a certain moment of its career, considers itself chosen. It is at this moment that it gives the best and the worst of itself.
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We must side with the oppressed on every occasion, even when they are in the wrong, though without losing sight of the fact that they are molded of the same clay as their oppressors.
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So long as a nation keeps the awareness of its superiority, it is fierce and respected; once it loses that awareness, a nation becomes humanized, and no longer counts.
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Themistocles, by a unanimously approved decree, had the interpreter of Xerxes’ ambassadors put to death “for having dared use the Greek language to express the orders of a barbarian.”
A people commits such an act only at the peak of its career. It is decadent, it is dying, when it no longer believes in its language, when it stops believing that its language is the supreme form of expression, the language.
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A nineteenth-century philosopher maintained, In his innocence, that la Rochefoucauld was right for the past, but that he would be invalidated by the fixture. The Idea of progress dishonors the intellect.
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In the long run, tolerance breeds more ills than intolerance. If this is true, it constitutes the most serious accusation that can be made against man.
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If humanity has such love for saviors, those fanatics who so shamelessly believe in themselves, it is because humanity supposes they believe in it.
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The appetite for destruction is so deeply anchored within us that no one manages to extirpate it. It belongs to our constitution, for the very basis of our being is demoniac.
The sage is a pacified, withdrawn destroyer. The others are destroyers in practice.
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I am stirred, even overwhelmed each time I happen upon an innocent person. Where does he come from? What is he after? Doesn’t such an apparition herald some disaster? It is a very special disturbance we suffer in the presence of someone there is no way of calling our kind.
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A man who has completely vanquished selfishness, who retains no trace of it whatever, cannot live longer than twenty-one days, according to one modern Vedantist school. No Western moralist, not even the grimmest, would have dared venture an observation on human nature so startling, so revealing.
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The virtues have no face. Impersonal, abstract, conventional, they wear out faster than the vices, which, more powerfully charged with vitality, define themselves and become accentuated with age.
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It is because of speech that men give the illusion of being free. If they did—without a word—what they do, we would take them for robots. By speaking, they deceive themselves, as they deceive others: because they say what they are going to do, who could suspect they are not masters of their actions?
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When man forgets he is mortal, he feels inclined to do great things, and sometimes succeeds. This oblivion, fruit of excess, is at the same time the cause of his woes. “Mortal, think as a mortal.” Antiquity invented a tragic modesty.
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When you know yourself well and do not despise yourself utterly, it is because you are too exhausted to indulge in extreme feelings.
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“… the feeling of being everything and the evidence of being nothing.” I happened across this phrase in my youth, and was overwhelmed by it. Everything I felt in those days, and everything I would feel from then on, was summed up in this eitraordinary banal formula, the synthesis of expansion and failure, ecstasy and impasse. Most often it is not in a paradox but in a truism that a revelation appears.
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I shall never understand how we can live knowing that we are not—to say the least!—eternal.
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Unconsciousness is the secret, the “vital principle” of life…. It is the sole recourse against the self, against the disease of being individualized, against the debilitating effect of the state of consciousness, a state so formidable, so demanding, that it must be reserved for athletes alone.
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Any success, in any realm, involves an inner impoverishment It makes us forget what we are, it deprives us of the torment of our limits.
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The pangs of truth about ourselves are more than we can endure. How pitiable the man (if such a being exists) who no longer lies to himself!
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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 own 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.
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I was shaking with rage: my honor was at stake. The hours passed, dawn was approaching. Was I going to ruin my night because of a trifle? Try as I would to minimize the incident, the reasons I invented to calm myself remained ineffectual. That anyone would dare do such a thing to me! I was on the point of opening the window and screaming like a madman, when the image of our planet spinning like a top suddenly seized my mind. My anger subsided at once.
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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.
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