Sometimes it seems better to realize yourself than to let yourself go, sometimes it seems the contrary. And you are quite right in both cases.
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Our virtues, far from reinforcing each other, actually envy and exclude each other: When we grow conscious of their warfare, we begin to denounce them one by one, only too pleased not to have to take any futher trouble for any of them.
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What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?
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Every action, as action, is possible only because we have broken with Paradise, whose memory, which poisons our hours, makes each of us a demoralized angel.
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Our repressed prayers explode in sarcasms.
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We have the feeling we are someone only when we brood over some misdeed.
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If we make doubt a goal, it can be as comforting as faith. Doubt too is capable of fervor, doubt too, in its way, triumphs over every perplexity, doubt too has an answer to everything. How account for its bad reputation then? From the fact that it is rarer than faith, less accessible, and more mysterious. We cannot imagine what is going on in the doubter’s house. . . .
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In the marketplace, a five-year-old writhes, screams in a tantrum. Women rush to him, try to soothe him. He goes right on, exaggerates, exceeds all limits. The more you watch, the more you’d like to wring his neck. His mother, finally realizing he has to be taken away, implores the wild creature: “Come on, darling,let’s go home now!” You think—with what satisfaction!—of Calvin, for whom children are “lumps of filth” or of Freud who labels them “polymorphous perverse.” Either would certainly have said, “Suffer the little monsters to come unto me!”
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In the decision to abjure salvation, there is no diabolic element; for if there were, what would account for the serenity which accompanies such a decision? Nothing diabolic induces serenity. In the Devil’s vicinity, we are, on the contrary, morose—my case. . . . Hence my serenity is short-lived: just long enough to persuade me to have nothing to do with salavation. Luckily, I am often so persuaded, and each time, what peace!
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To get up early, filled with energy and enthusiasm, wonderfully ready to commit some wretched nastiness.
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“Free to the last degree”—this phrase raised the bum on the day he uttered it above philosophers, conquerors, and saints; for none of them, at the apex of his career, dared invoke such a success.
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A fallen man is like all the rest of us except that he has not condescended to play the game. We reproach him for that, and avoid him, we resent his having revealed and displayed our secret—we rightly regard him as a wretch and a traitor.
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Flung out of sleep by the question, “Where is this moment going?” “To death,” was my answer, and I fell back asleep at once.
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We should trust only explanations which invoke physiology and theology. Whatever happens between the two is of no importance.
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Our pleasure in foreseeing a catastrophe diminishes as the catastrophe approaches and ceases altogether once it is upon us.
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Wisdom disguises our wounds: it teaches us how to bleed in secret.
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The critical moment for a prophet is the one when he is ultimately imbued by what he preaches, when he is conquered by his own vaticinations. Henceforth a slave, an automaton, he will occupy himself regretting the time when, a free man, he announced calamities without quite believing in them, when he fabricated fears for himself. It is not easy to act an Isaiah and a Jeremiah sincerely. Which is why most prophets prefer being impostors.
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Everything that happens to us, everything that counts for us affords no interest for someone else: it is on the basis of this evidence that we should elaborate our rules of behavior. A reflective mind should banish from its intimate vocabulary the word event.. . .
Anyone who hasn’t died young deserves to die.
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Nothing gives us a better conscience than to fall asleep with the clear view of one of our defects, which till then we hadn’t dared admit, we hadn’t even suspected.
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Everything blurs and fades in human beings except the look in their eyes and the voice: without these, we could recognize no one after a few years.
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At this very moment, almost everywhere, thousands and thousands are dying, while, clutching my pen, I vainly search for a word to annotate their agony.
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To dwell on an action, however unmentionable, to invent scruples for yourself and get tangled in them, proves that you are still concerned with your kind, that you like to torment yourself on their account. . . . I shall consider myself liberated only on the day when, like murderers and sages, I have swept my conscience clean of all the impurities of remorse.
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Tired of being myself—yet I keep praying the gods to restore me to myself.
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To regret is to deliberate in the past tense—to substitute the possible for the irreparable, to cheat by heartbreak.
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Delirium is incontestably finer than doubt, but doubt is solider.
. . .Skepticism is the faith of what Montaigne calls undulant minds.
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To see nothing but words in the calumny of words is the one way to endure that calumny without suffering. Dissect any remark made against yourself, isolate each syllable, treat it with the disdain an adjective is worth, a substantive, an adverb. . . . Or else liquidate the calumniator on the spot.
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Our claims to detachment always help us not to ward off blows but to digest them. In any humiliation, there is a first and a second period. It is in the second that our coquetry with sagesse is revealed to be useful.
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What place do we occupy in the “universe”? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we are evidently so insignificant? Once we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.
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To know is to discern the bearing of illusion, a key word as essential to the Vedanta as to the song, to the only ways of translating the experience of unreality.
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In the British Museum, looking at the mummy of a singer whose tiny finger-nails stick out of the wrappings, I remember swearing never to say “I . . .” again.
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There is only one sign that indicates we have understood everything: tears without cause.. . .
Fear of an imminent collapse of the brain counts for a great deal in the need to pray.
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Happiness and misery being evils for approximately the same reason, the one way of avoiding them is to make yourself external to everything.
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When I spend days and days among texts concerned with nothing but serenity, contemplation, and ascesis, I am filled with a longing to rush out into the street and break the skull of the first person I meet.
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The proof that this world is not a success is that we can compare ourselves without indecency to Him Who is supposed to have created it, but not to Napoleon or even to a bum, especially if the latter is incomparable of his kind.
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“It could not have done better”—a remark made by a pagan about providence which no Father of the Church was honest enough to apply to God.
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Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
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If a Christian heresy—any one of them—had triumphed, it would not have wasted its time on nuances. Bolder than the Church, it would also have been more intolerant, since more convinced. No doubt about it: victorious, the Cathari would have outstripped the Inquisitors. For any victim, however noble, let us have a pity without illusions.. . .
What remains of a philosopher is his temperament, what makes him forget himself, yield to his contradictions, his whims, reactions incompatible with the fundamental lines of his system. If he seeks truth, let him free himself of all concern with coherence. He must express only what he thinks and not what he had decided to think. The more alive he will be, the more he will let himself be himself; and will survive only if he takes no account of what he ought to think.
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When we are to meditate upon vacuity, impermanence, nirvana, crouching or lying down is the best position. It is the one in which these themes were conceived. It is only in the West that man thinks standing up. Which accounts perhaps for the unfortunately positive character of our philosophy.
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We can endure an affront only by imagining the scenes of revenge, of the triumph we shall someday have over the wretch who has flouted us. Without this prospect, we would fall victim to disturbances which would radically renew madness.
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Every mortal agony is in itself curious; the most interesting, however, remains that of the cynic, of the man who theoretically disdains it.
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What is the name of this bone I am touching? What can it have in common with me? I should begin the operation all over again with another part of my body and continue until the moment when nothing is mine.
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To have both the taste for provocation and the taste for effacement—to be by instinct a spoilsport and by conviction a corpse!
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After so many living men, all dead—how tiring to die in our turn and to suffer, like them, this inept fear! How explain that it still persists, that it is not exhausted or discredited, and that we can still sustain it as intensely as the first mortal?
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The hermit assumes responsibilities only toward himself or toward everyone; in no case toward someone. He takes refuge in solitude in order to have no one in his care: himself and the universe—enough.
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If I were sure of my indifference to salvation, I should be far and away the happiest man who ever lived.
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To come to your senses, there is nothing like being “forgotten.” No one coming between us and what counts. The more others turn away from us, the more they labor toward our perfection: they save us by abandoning us.
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My doubts about Providence never last long: Who, except for Providence, would be in a position to distribute so punctually our ration of daily defeats?
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“Take nothing to heart,” murmurs the man who blames himself each time he suffers, and who loses no opportunity for suffering.
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The battle waged in each individual by the fanatic and the impostor is the reason we never know whom to turn to.. . .
“What are you working on? What are you doing now?” Would anyone have dared ask Pyrrho or Laotsŭ such a question? We do not imagine that the questions no one could have asked our idols can be asked of us.
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By nature I am so refractory to the slightest undertaking that to bring myself to perform one I first have to read some biography of Alexander or Genghis Khan.
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What should make old age endurable is the pleasure of seeing disappear, one by one, all those who have believed in us and whom we can no longer disappoint.
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It is my delight to gloss our fall from grace—I love living as a parasite of original sin.
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If we could make ourselves inhumiliable!
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Contrary to the common allegation, suffering attaches, rivets, us to life: it is our suffering, we are flattered to be able to endure it, it testifies to our quality as a being and not as a specter. So virulent is the pride of suffering that it is exceeded only by the pride of having suffered.
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Determined to save the past, regret represents our sole recourse against the maneuvers of forgetting: What is regret in substance, if not memory on the offensive? By resuscitating so many episodes and distorting them at will, it offers us all the versions we want of our life, so that it is correct to assert that it is thanks to regret that our life seems to us at once pitiable and fulfilled.. . .
Every theoretical formula, appearing in sleep, interrupts its course. Dreams are events. Once one of them turns into a problem, or ends in a discovery, we waken with a start. “To think” asleep is an anomaly, frequent among the oppressed, among those who in fact sleep badly, because their miseries culminate in definitions, night after night.
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We make martyrs of ourselves, we create, by torments, a “conscience”; and then, we realize with horror that we can never get rid of it again.
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The discomfort that follows on a pettiness is the state most favorable to self-examination; it even identifies itself with such reflections. Scarcely surprising that each time it seizes upon us, we should have the impression of knowing ourselves at last.
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The only subversive mind is the one which questions the obligation to exist; all the others, the anarchist at the head of the list, compromise with the established order.
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My preferences: the age of the Cave Man, the century of the Enlightenment. But I do not forget that the caves opened onto history, and the salons onto the guillotine.
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Everywhere, flesh for money. But what can a subsidized flesh be worth? In the old days we engendered out of conviction or by accident; today, in order to gain a subsistance allowance or a tax deduction. Such excess of calculation cannot fail to damage the quality of the spermatozoa.
. . .To look for a meaning in anything is less the act of a naif than of a masochist.
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To become conscious of our complete, our radical destructibility is salvation itself. But it is to go counter to our deepest tendencies to know we are, at every moment, destructible. Might salvation be an exploit contra naturam?
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Frivolous, disconnected, an amateur at everything, I shall have known thoroughly only the disadvantage of having been born.
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We should philosophize as if “philosophy” didn’t exist, like some troglodyte dazed or daunted by the procession of scourges which pass before his eyes.
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To relish one’s pain—the feeling and even the expression figure in Homer, though of course as an exception. As a general rule, we must wait till more recent times for it. It is a long road from the epic to the diary.
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We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
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Rats, confined in a limited space and fed solely on those chemical products we stuff them with become, apparently, much nastier and more aggressive than usual. Doomed as they multiply to pile on top of each other, men will detest each other much more than before, they will even invent unwonted forms of hatred, they will rend each other as they never did before, and a universal civil war will explode, not because of claims but because of humanity’s inability to witness the spectacle it affords itself. Even now, if for a single moment it glimpsed the whole future, humanity would not survive that moment.
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The only true solitude is where we brood upon the urgency of a prayer—a prayer posterior to God and to faith itself.
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We should keep reminding ourselves that everything that delights or distresses us corresponds to nothing, that it is all quite meaningless and futile. . . . Well, I keep reminding myself of it every day, and I continue nonetheless in my delight, in my distress.
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We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.
The New Gods
E. M. Cioran
Translated from the French by
RICHARD HOWARD
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