Endless brooding over a question undermines you as much as a dull pain.
. . .
In what ancient author did I read that melancholy was caused by “slowing” of the blood? Just what it is: stagnant blood.
. . .
You are done for—a living dead man—not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the “mystery” of life. Not for nothing is hatred still the best tonic ever discovered, for which any organism, however feeble, has a tolerance.
. . .
Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.
. . .
It is in the nature of a rich mind not to shrink from foolishness, that scarecrow of the finicky—whence the latter’s sterility.
. . .To make more plans than an explorer or a crook, yet to be infected at the will’s very root.
. . .
Refinement is the sign of deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.
. . .
What is a “contemporary”? Someone you’d like to kill, without quite knowing how.
. . .
Each moment’s tug of war between nostalgia for the deluge and intoxication with routine.
. . .
To have the vice of scruple—to be an automaton of remorse.
. . .
Terrifying happiness. Veins in which thousands of planets distend.
. . .
The most difficult thing in the world is to put yourself in tune with being, to catch its pitch.
. . .
Sickness gives flavor to want, it intensifies, it picks up poverty.
. . .
The mind advances only if it has the patience to go in circles, in other words, to deepen.
. . .
First duty, on getting up in the morning: to blush for yourself.
. . .
Fear will have been the inexhaustible nourishment of his life. He was swollen, stuffed, obese with fear.
. . .The lot of the man who has rebelled too much is to have no energy left except for disappointment.
. . .
No assertion is more false than Origen’s, according to which each soul has the body it deserves.
. . .
In every prophet coexist a craving for the future and an aversion for happiness.
. . .
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
. . .
To remember suddenly that you have a skull—and not to lose your mind over it!
. . .
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 only man who knows what it feels like to be accursed is the man who knows he would have that feeling in the middle of paradise.
. . .
All our thoughts are a function of our ailments. If we understand certain things, the credit for it goes to the gaps in our health—and to them alone.
. . .
If he didn’t believe in his “star,” he couldn’t perform the merest action without an effort: to drink a glass of water would seem a gigantic, even a deranged undertaking.
. . .What they ask you for is actions, proofs, works, and all you can produce are transformed tears.
. . .
An ambitious man resigns himself to obscurity only after having exhausted all the reserves of bitterness he possessed.
. . .
I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.
. . .
To enjoy only hymns, blasphemy, epilepsy. . . .
. . .
To conceive a thought—just one, but one that would tear the universe to pieces.
. . .
Only insofar as we do not know ourselves is it possible for us to realize and to produce ourselves. Fruitful is the man who is mistaken as to the motives of his actions, who resists weighing his qualities and defects, who foresees and dreads the impasse into which the exact view of our capacities leads us. The creator who becomes transparent to himself no longer creates: to know oneself is to smother one’s endowments and one’s demon.
. . .
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
. . .
“Never let melancholy assail you, for melancholy forbids all good,” says Tauler’s sermon on the “Right Use of the Day.” The wrong use I have made of each of my days!
. . .
I have repressed all my enthusiasms; but they exist, they constitute my reserves, my unexploited resources, perhaps my future.
. . .
The mind staved in by lucidity.
. . .
My doubts have not been able to get the better of my automatisms. I continue to make gestures to which it is impossible for me to adhere. To overcome the drama of this insincerity would be to renounce, to annul myself.
. . .
We really believe only as long as we are unaware that we must implore. A religion is alive only before the elaboration of its prayers.
. . .
Every form of impotence and failure involves a positive character in the metaphysical order.
. . .
Nothing could persuade me that this world is not the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend, and that it is incumbent upon me to exhaust the consequences of the curse hanging over him and his creation.
. . .
Psychoanalysis will be entirely discredited one of these days, no doubt about it. Which will not keep it from having destroyed our last vestiges of naïveté. After psychoanalysis, we can never again be innocent.
. . .
The very night when I asserted that our dreams had no relation to our innermost life and that they derived from bad literature, I fell asleep only to be the onlooker at the procession of my oldest and most hidden terrors.. . .
What is called “strength of mind” is the courage not to imagine our fate otherwise.. . .
A writer worthy of the name confines himself to his mother tongue and does not go ferreting about in this or that alien idiom. He is limited, and likes to be—out of self-defense. Nothing wrecks a talent more certainly than a mind too wide open.
. . .
The moralist’s primordial duty is to depoeticize his prose; only then, to observe men.
. . .
“How badly nature has conceived us!” an old woman once said to me. “It is nature herself that is badly conceived,” I should have answered, if I had heeded my Manichean reflexes.
. . .
Irresolution has become virtually a mission for him. Anyone at all made him despair of all his resources. He was incapable of making a decision in front of a face.
. . .
All things considered, it is pleasanter to be surprised by events than to have anticipated them. When we exhaust our powers in the vision of disaster, how are we to confront disaster itself? Cassandra torments herself doubly, before and during the calamity, whereas the optimist is spared the pangs of prescience.
. . .
According to Plutarch, by the first century of our era men went to Delphi only to ask trivial questions (marriage, investments, etc.). The decadence of the Church imitates that of the oracles.. . .
“The naive is a nuance of vulgarity”: Fontenelle. There are certain remarks which are the key to a country, because they yield us the secret of its limits.
. . .
Napoleon, on Saint Helena, liked to leaf through a grammar from time to time. . . . Thereby, at least, he proved he was French.
. . .
Sunday afternoon. Streets filled with a haggard, exhausted, pitiable crowd—rejects from everywhere, vestiges of continents, scum of the earth. One thinks of Rome under the Caesars, overrun by the dregs of the Empire. Every world center is a city dump.
. . .
The disappearance of animals is a phenomenon of unprecedented gravity. Their executioner has invaded the landscape; there is no room left for anyone or anything but him. The horror of finding a man where you could contemplate a horse!
. . .
Insomnia’s role in history, from Caligula to Hitler. Is the impossibility of sleeping the cause or the consequence of cruelty? The tyrant lies awake—that is what defines him.
. . .
A beggar’s remark: “When you pray beside a flower, it grows faster.”
. . .
Anxiety is not difficult, it adapts itself to everything, for there is nothing which fails to please it. At the first excuse, an eminently miscellaneous occurrence, it presses in, fondles, taps a mediocre but certain malaise on which it feeds. Anxiety is content with little enough, anything will serve. Ineffectual trifler, anxiety lacks class: it tries for anguish, and falls short.
. . .
How does it happen that in life as in literature, rebellion, however pure, has something false about it, whereas resignation, however tainted with listlessness, always gives the impression of authenticity?
. . .
Squatting on the banks of the Seine, several million soured souls elaborate a nightmare in common which the rest of the world. . . . envies.
. . .
What is commonly called “being expressive” is being prolix.
. . .
His sterility was infinite: it partook of ecstasy.
. . .
The certitude of failing my obligations, of not doing what I was born for, of letting the hours go by without taking advantage of them, even a negative advantage. This last reproach is is not justified though—boredom, my running sore, being precisely that paradoxical advantage.
. . .
To be naturally combative, aggressive, intolerant—and to be unable to appeal to any dogma!
. . .
Confronted with this bug the size of a comma running across my desk, my first reaction was charitable: to squash it. Then I decided to abandon the creature to its panic: what was the use of liberating it? Only, I should so much have liked to know where it was going!
. . .An anxious man constructs his terrors, then installs himself within them: a stay-at-home in a yawning chasm.
. . .
Impossible to know why an idea seizes upon us and will not let us go. As if it rose up out of the weakest point of our mind or, more exactly, out of the most threatened point of our brain.
. . .
Expert at dissimulating his pride, the sage is someone who does not deign to hope.
. . .
That sudden tension, that sense that something is happening, that the mind’s fate is being decided. . . .
. . .
Madness is perhaps merely an affliction which no longer develops.
. . .
Those moments when it seems impossible for us ever to disappear, when life and death lose all reality, when neither one nor the other can touch us yet. . . .
. . .
It is a mistake to identify dejection and thought. Were we to do so, anyone who felt depressed would automatically become a thinker. The worst of it is, he does.
. . .
The experience of inanity, of the void, sufficient unto itself, also involves such philosophic virtues that one fails to see why we should look elsewhere. What does it matter if we discover nothing by this experience if by this experience we understand everything!
. . .Living is an impossibility of which I have unceasingly become aware, day after day, for, say, forty years. . . .
. . .
Memory’s one function is to help us regret.
. . .
I can distinctly imagine the moment when there will no longer be a trace of flesh anywhere, and yet I go on as if it made no difference. How define this state in which consciousness does not weaken desire, in which it actually stimulates desire, the way—it is true—the worm wakens the fruit?
. . .
The continuity of reflection is thwarted and even broken each time the brain’s physical presence is felt. This is perhaps the reason why the mad think only in flashes.. . .
Sometimes you feel like shouting to the ci-devant gods: “Oh, exert yourselves a little, just try to re-exist!” Grumble as I will against everything that is, I am nonetheless attached to it—judging by these discomforts that are related to the first symptoms of being.
. . .
The skeptic is the least mysterious of men, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world.
The New Gods
E. M. Cioran
Translated from the French by
RICHARD HOWARD
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