Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all

 No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.

When we consider coldly that portion of duration granted to each of us, it seems equally satisfactory and equally ludicrous, whether it lasts a day or a century.

“I’ve had my time”—no expression can be uttered more appropriately at any moment of life, including the first.

Death is the providence of those who will have had the taste and the talent for fiasco—the recompense of all who have come to nothing, who wanted not to…. It warrants them, it is their way of winning. On the other hand, for the others, those who have labored to succeed, and who have succeeded: what a denial, what a slap in the face!

An Egyptian monk, after fifteen years of complete solitude, received a packet of letters from his family and friends. He did not open them, he flung them into the fire in order to escape the assault of memory. We cannot sustain communion with oursclf and our thoughts if we allow ghosts to appear, to prevail. The desert signifies not so much a new life as the death of the past: at last we have escaped our own history. In society, no less than in the Thebaid, the letters we write, and those we receive, testify to the fact that we are in chains, that we have broken none of the bonds, that we are merely slaves and deserve to be so.

A little patience and the moment will come when nothing more will be possible, when humanity, thrown back on itself, cannot take a single step in any direction. Though we may manage a general sense of this unprecedented spectacle, we should like details. … And we are afraid we will miss the festivities, not being young enough to have the luck to attend.

Whether it is spoken by a grocer or a philosopher, the word being, apparently so rich, so tempting, so charged with significance, in fact means nothing at all; incredible that a man in his right mind can use it on any occasion whatever.

Getting up in the middle of the night, I walked around my room with the certainty of being chosen and criminal, a double privilege natural to the sleepless, revolting or incomprehensible for the captives of daytime logic.

It is not given to everyone to have had an unhappy childhood. Mine was much more than happy—it was crowned. I cannot find a better adjective to designate what was triumphant about even its pangs. That had to be paid for, that could not go unpunished.

If I am so fond of Dostoevsky’s correspondence, It Is because he speaks in it of nothing but sickness and money, the only “burning” subjects. All the rest is merely flourishes and chaff.

In five hundred thousand years, it appears that England will be entirely submerged. If I were an Englishman I should lay down my arms at once.

Each of us has his unit of time. For one it is the day, the week, the month, or the year; for another, it is a decade, or a century…. These units, still on the human scale, are compatible with any plan, any task.

There are some, however, who take time itself for their unit, and sometimes raise themselves above it: for them, what task, what plan deserves to be taken seriously? A man who sees too far, who is contemporary with the whole future, can no longer act or even move….

An obsession with the precarious accompanies me in every circumstance: mailing a letter this morning, I told myself it was addressed to a mortal.

One absolute experience, apropos of anything, and you seem, in your own eyes, a survivor.

I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to howl would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.

The first condition for becoming a saint is to love bores, to endure visits….

To shake people up, to wake them from their sleep, while knowing you are committing a crime and that it would te a thousand times tetter to leave them alone, since when they wake, too, you have nothing to offer them….

Port-Royal. In that green vale, so many conflicts and lacerations on account of a few bagatelles! Any belief, after a certain time, seems gratuitous and incomprehensible, as does the counter-belief which has destroyed it. Only the stupefaction which both provoke remains.

A poor wretch who feels time, who is its victim, its martyr, who experiences nothing else, who is time at each moment, knows what a metaphysician or a poet divines only by grace of a collapse or a miracle.

Those inner rumblings which come to nothing, and by which we are reduced to the state of a grotesque volcano.

Each time I am gripped by a fit of rage, I begin by being aggrieved and disgusted, then I teil myself: what luck, what a windfall! I am still alive, I am still one of those flesh-and-blood ghosts, …

There was no end to the telegram I had just received. All my pretentions, all my inadequacies were in it. Certain failings I myself scarcely suspected were revealed, were proclaimed! What prescience, and what detail! At the end of the interminable indictment, no clue, no trace that permitted me to identify the sender. Who could it be? And why this haste, this unaccustomed means of communication? Who ever spoke his mind with such rigor in his grievance? Where did he come from, this omniscient judge who dared not name himself, this coward in possession of all my secrets, this inquisitor who allowed no extenuating circumstances, not even the ones granted by the most hardened torturers? I too might have made a misstep or two, I too am entitled to some indulgence. I cringe before the inventory of my defects, I choke, I cannot bear this procession of truths…. Cursed telegram—I tear it up, and awaken….

To have opinions is inevitable, is natural; to have convictions is less so. Each time I meet someone who has convictions, I wonder what intellectual vice, what flaw has caused him to acquire such a thing. However legitimate this question, my habit of raising it spoils the pleasure of conversation for me, gives me a bad conscience, makes me hateful in my own eyes.

Once upon a time writing seemed important to me. Of all my superstitions, this one seems the most compromising and the most incomprehensible.

I have abused the word disgust. But what other can I use to indicate a state in which exasperation is continually corrected by lassitude, and lassitude by exasperation?

All evening, having tried to define him, we reviewed all the euphemisms which allow us not to pronounce, in his regard, the word perfidy. He is not perfidious, he is merely tortuous, diabolically tortuous, and at the same time innocent, naïve, even angelic. Imagine, if you can, a mixture of Aliosha and Smerdyakov.

When you no longer believe in yourself, you stop producing or struggling, you even stop raising questions or answering them, whereas it is the contrary which should have occurred, since it is precisely at this moment that, being free of all bonds, you are likely to grasp the truth, discern what is real and what is not. But once your belief in your own role, or your own lot, has dried up, you become incurious about everything else, even the “truth,” though you are closer to it than ever before.

In Paradise, I would not last a “season” or even a day; then how account for my nostalgia for it? I don’t account for it, it has inhabited me always, it was part of me before I was.

Anyone may now and then have the sense of occupying only a point and a moment; to have such a sense day and night, hour by hour, is less frequent, and it is from this experience, this datum, that one turns toward nirvana or sarcasm—or toward both at once.

Although I have sworn never to sin against blessed concision, I am still in complicity with words, and if I am seduced by silence I dare not enter it, I merely prowl on its peripheries.

We should establish a religion’s degree of truth according to what it makes of the Devil: the more eminent the rank it accords him, the more it testifies that it is concerned with reality, that it rejects deceit and lies, that it is serious, that it sets more store by verification than by distraction or consolation.

Nothing deserves to be undone, doubtless because nothing deserved to be done. Hence we become detached from everything, from the original as well as from the ultimate, from advent as well as from collapse.

We know, we feel that everything has been said, that there is nothing left to say. But we feel less that this truth affords language a strange, even unsettling status which redeems it. Words are ultimately saved because they have ceased living.

The enormous good and the enormous harm I have drawn from my ruminations on the’condition of the dead.

The undeniable advantage of growing old is to be able to observe at close range the slow and methodical degradation of our organs; they are all beginning to go, some obviously, others discreetly. They become detached from the body, as the body becomes detached from us: it escapes us, flees us, no longer belongs to us. It is a traitor we cannot even denounce, since it stops nowhere and puts itself in no one’s service.

I never tire of reading about the hermits, preferably about those said to be “weary of seeking God.” I am dazzled by the failures of the Desert.

If, somehow, Rimbaud had been able to go on (as likely as imagining the day after the apocalypse, or a Nietzsche scribbling away after Ecce Homo), he would have ended by reining in, calming down, by glossing his own explosions, explicating them—and himself. A sacrilege in every case, excess of consciousness being only a form of profanation.

I have followed only one idea all the way—the idea that everything man achieves necessarily turns against him. The idea is not a new one, but I have lived it with a power of conviction, a desperation which no fanaticism, no delirium has ever approached. There is no martyrdom, no dishonor I would not suffer for it, and I would exchange it for no other truth, no other revelation.

To go still further than Buddha, to raise oneself above nirvana, to learn to do without it …, to be stopped by nothing, not even by the notion of deliverance, regarding it as a mere way-station, an embarrassment, an eclipse …

My weakness for doomed dynasties, for decaying empires, for the Montezumas of forever, for those who believe in signs, for the lacerated and pursued, for the drunkards of the ineluctable, for the jeopardized, the devoured, for all who are waiting for their executioner …

I pass without stopping at the grave of that critic whose vitriolic remarks I have so often pondered. Nor at the grave of the poet who spent his life dreaming of his ultimate dissolution. Other names pursue me, alien names linked to a pitiless and pacifying wisdom, to a vision calculated to free the mind from all obsessions, even funereal ones. Nagarjuna, Chandrakirti, Santideva—unparalleled swashbucklers, dialecticians belabored by the obsession of salvation, acrobats and apostles of Vacuity for whom, sages among the sages, the universe was only a word….

No matter how many autumns I observe the spectacle of these leaves so eager to fall, it still surprises me each time—a surprise in which “a chill down the spine” would prevail were it not for the last-minute explosion of a gaiety whose origin I cannot account for.

There are certain moments when, remote as we are from any faith, we can conceive of only God as our interlocutor. To address ourselves elsewhere seems an impossibility, a madness. Solitude, in its extreme reaches, requires a form of conversation, also extreme.

Man gives off a special odor: of all the animals, he alone smells of the corpse.

The hours would not pass; dawn seemed remote, inconceivable. Actually it was not dawn I was waiting for but oblivion of those refractory hours which refused to stir. Lucky the man condemned to death, I told myself, who on the eve of his execution is at least sure of having one good night!

Will I be able to stand another minute? will I collapse? If there is one interesting sensation, it is the one which gives us the foretaste of epilepsy.

A man who survives himself despises himself without acknowledging as much, sometimes without even knowing as much.

When you live past the age of rebellion, and you still rebel, you seem to yourself a kind of senile Lucifer.

If we did not tear the stigmata of life, how easy it would be to steal away, and how well everything would go by itself!

Better than anyone I am able to forgive on the spot. My desire for revenge comes late, too late, when memory of the offense is fading and when, the incitation to action having become virtually nonexistent, I have only one recourse: to deplore my “good feelings.”

Only to the degree that our moments afford us some contact with death do we have some chance to glimpse on what insanity all existence is based.

Ultimately, it is entirely a matter of indifference whether we are something, even if we are God. On this, with a little pressure, almost everyone might be brought to agree. But how does it happen then that everyone aspires to further life, to additional being, and that there is no one who strives to sink, to descend toward the ideal default?

According to a belief rather widespread among certain tribes, the dead speak the same language as the living, except that for them words have a meaning contrary to the one they had: large means small, near far, black white….

Does dying come down to that? Still, better than any funereal invention, this complete reversal of language indicates what is unwonted, dumbfounding about death….

I am perfectly willing to believe in man’s future, but how is one to manage it when still, after all, in possession of one’s faculties? It would take their virtually complete collapse, and even then …!

A thought which is not secretly stamped by fatality is interchangeable, worthless, is merely thought….

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.

No one more useless, and more unusable, than I: a datum I must quite simply accept, without taking any pride in the fact whatever. So long as this is not the case, the consciousness of my usclessness will serve for nothing.

Whatever the nightmare, one takes a role in it, one is the protagonist, one is something. It is at night that the disinherited man triumphs. If we were to suppress bad dreams, there would be mass revolutions.

Terror of the future is always grafted onto the desire to experience that terror.

Suddenly I was alone with … I felt, that afternoon of my childhood, that a very serious event had just occurred. It was my first awakening, the first indication, the premonitory sign of consciousness. Before that I had been only a being. From that moment, I was more and less than that. Each begins with a rift and a revelation.

Birth and chain are synonyms. To see the light of day, to see shackles …

To say “Everything is illusory” is to court illusion, to accord it a high degree of reality, the highest in fact, whereas on the contrary one wanted to discredit it. The solution? To stop proclaiming or denouncing it, serving it by thinking about it. The very idea that disqualifies all ideas is a fetter.

If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis—the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.

Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one’s reach.

No one has loved this world more than I, and yet if it had been offered to me, even as a child, on a platter, I should have shrieked, “Too late, too late!”

“What’s wrong—what’s the matter with you?” Nothing, nothing’s the matter, I’ve merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don’t know where to turn, what to run for….

Cioran 

The Trouble With Being Born