Emil Cioran
Born in 1911 in Rășinari, a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, raised under the rule of a father who was a Romanian Orthodox priest and a mother who was prone to depression, Emil Cioran wrote his first five books in Romanian. Some of these are collections of brief essays (one or two pages, on average); others are collections of aphorisms. Suffering from insomnia since his adolescent years in Sibiu, the young Cioran studied philosophy in the “little Paris” of Bucarest.
A prolific publicist, he became a well-known figure, along with Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noïca, and his future close friend Eugene Ionesco (with whom he shared the Royal Foundation’s Young Writers Prize in 1934 for his first book, On the Heights of Despair).
Influenced by the German romantics, by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Lebensphilosophie of Schelling and Bergson, by certain Russian writers, including Chestov, Rozanov, and Dostoyevsky, and by the Romanian poet Eminescu, Cioran wrote lyrical and expansive meditations that were often metaphysical in nature and whose recurrent themes were death, despair, solitude, history, music, saintliness and the mystics (cf. Tears and Saints, 1937) – all of which are themes that one finds again in his French writings. In his highly controversial book, The Transfiguration of Romania (1937), Cioran, who was at that time close to the Romanian fascists, violently criticized his country and his compatriots on the basis of a contrast between such “little nations” as Romania, which were contemptible from the perspective of universal history and great nations, such as France or Germany, which took their destiny into their own hands.
After spending two years in Germany, Cioran arrived in Paris in 1936. He continued to write in Romanian until the early 1940s (he wrote his last article in Romanian in 1943, which is also the year in which he began writing in French). The break with Romanian became definitive in 1946, when, in the course of translating Mallarmé, he suddenly decided to give up his native tongue since no one spoke it in Paris. He then began writing in French a book that, thanks to numerous intensive revisions, would eventually become the impressive 'A Short History of Decay' (1949) -- the first of a series of ten books in which Cioran would continue to explore his perennial obsessions, with a growing detachment that allies him equally with the Greek sophists, the French moralists, and the oriental sages. He wrote existential vituperations and other destructive reflections in a classical French style that he felt was diametrically opposed to the looseness of his native Romanian; he described it as being like a “straight-jacket” that required him to control his temperamental excesses and his lyrical flights. The books in which he expressed his radical disillusionment appeared, with decreasing frequency, over a period of more than three decades, during which time he shared his solitude with his companion Simone Boué in a miniscule garret in the center of Paris, where he lived as a spectator more and more turned in on himself and maintaining an ever greater distance from a world that he rejected as much on the historical level (History and Utopia, 1960) as on the ontological (The Fall into Time, 1964), raising his misanthropy to heights of subtlety (The Trouble with being Born, 1973), while also allowing to appear from time to time a humanism composed of irony, bitterness, and preciosity (Exercices d’admiration, 1986, and the posthumously published Notebooks).
Denied the right to return to Romania during the years of the communist regime, and attracting international attention only late in his career, Cioran died in Paris in 1995.
Nicolas Cavaillès
Translated by Thomas Cousineau
“Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.”
“I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?”
“Magnificat de Bach. Remué jusqu'aux larmes. Il est impossible que ce qui s'y exprime n'ait qu'une réalité subjective. L'« âme » doit être de la même essence que l'absolu. Et c'est le Vedânta qui a raison.”
“I hate wise men because they are lazy, cowardly, and prudent. To the philosophers' equanimity, which makes them indifferent to both pleasure and pain, I prefer devouring passions. The sage knows neither the tragedy of passion, nor the fear of death, nor risk and enthusiasm, nor barbaric, grotesque, or sublime heroism. He talks in proverbs and gives advice. He does not live, feel, desire, wait for anything. He levels down all the incongruities of life and then suffers the consequences. So much more complex is the man who suffers from limitless anxiety. The wise man's life is empty and sterile, for it is free from contradiction and despair. An existence full of irreconcilable contradictions is so much richer and creative. The wise man's resignation springs from inner void, not inner fire. I would rather die of fire than of void.”
“To grant life more importance than it has is the mistake committed in sagging systems; as a consequence, no one is ready to sacrifice himself to defend them, and they collapse under the first blows perpetrated upon them. This is even more true of nations in general. Once they begin to hold life sacred, it abandons them, it ceases to be on their side.”
“I have always struggled, with the sole intention of ceasing to struggle. Result: zero.”
“But man is a strayed animal, and when he falls victim to doubt, if he should happen to take no further pleasure in attacking others, he turns on himself in order to inflict merciless tortures.”
“The state of health is a state of nonsensation, even nonreality. As soon as we cease to suffer, we cease to exist.”
“Impartiality is incompatible with the will to affirm oneself or quite simply with the will to exist. To acknowledge another’s merits is an alarming symptom, an act against nature.”
“In flawed families, a scion appears who dedicates himself to the truth and who ruins himself in its pursuit.”
“If there was a common, even official form of killing oneself, suicide would be much easier and much more frequent. But since to be done with it all we must find our own way, we waste so much time meditating on trifles that we forget what is essential.”
“The idea of the Eternal Return can be fully grasped only by a man endowed with several chronic, hence recurrent infirmities, and who thus has the advantage of proceeding from relapse to relapse, with all that this implies as philosophic reflexion.”
“Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself.”
“While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning how to play a new tune on the flute. “What will be the use of that?” he was asked. “To know this tune before dying.” If I dare repeat this reply long since trivialized by the handbooks, it is because it seems to me the sole serious justification of any desire to know, whether exercised on the brink of death or at any other moment of existence.”
“Boredom in the midst of paradise generated our first ancestor’s appetite for the abyss which has won us this procession of centuries whose end we now have in view. That appetite, a veritable nostalgia for hell, would not fail to ravage the race following us and to make it the worthy heir of our misfortunes.”
“The more power man acquires, the more vulnerable he becomes. What he must fear most is the moment when, creation entirely fleeced, he will celebrate his triumph, that fatal apotheosis, the victory he will not survive.”
“Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.”
“Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.”
“Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.”
“Read day and night, devour books—these sleeping pills—not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.”
“Il ne fait aucun doute pour moi que la sagesse est le but principal de la vie et c'est pourquoi je reviens toujours aux stoïciens. Ils ont atteint la sagesse, on ne peut donc plus les appeler des philosophes au sens propre du terme. De mon point de vue, la sagesse est le terme naturel de la philosophie, sa fin dans les deux sens du mot. Une philosophie finit en sagesse et par là même disparaît.”
“Le Requiem de Mozart. Un souffle de l'au-delà y plane. Comment croire, après une pareille audition, que l'univers n'ait aucun sens? Il faut qu'il en ait un. Que tant de sublime se résolve dans le néant, le coeur, aussi bien que l'entendement, refuse de l'admettre. Quelque chose doit exister quelque part, un brin de réalité doit être contenu dans ce monde. Ivresse du possible qui rachète la vie. Craignons le retombement et le retour du savoir amer...”
“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.”
“No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.”
“As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?”
“If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.”
“How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history—greater than the fall of empires—I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.”
“I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.”
“I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?”
“Né avec une âme habituelle, j'en ai demandé une autre à la musique : ce fut le début de malheurs inespérés.”
“A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society”
“Sólo el instante es divino infinito irremediable. El instante que uno está viviendo.”
“Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.”
“The dead center of existence: when it is all the same to you whether you read a newspaper article or think about God.”
“All that is Life in me urges me to give up God.”
“Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world.”
“Tell me how you want to die, and I’ll tell you who you are.”
“The Romans were not wiped out by the invasions of the barbarians, nor by the Christian virus, but by a more subtle evil, boredom.”
“Heroes abound at the dawn of civilizations, during pre-Homeric and Gothic epochs, when people, not having yet experienced spiritual torture, satisfy their thirst for renunciation through a derivative: heroism.”
“Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don’t know, and we don’t really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.”
“The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.”
“The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It’s not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.”
“Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.”
“Love of the absolute engenders a predilection for self-destruction. Hence the passion for monasteries and brothels. Cells and women, in both cases. Weariness with life fares well in the shadow of whores and saintly women.”
“There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.”
“The initial revelation of any monastery: everything is nothing. Thus begin all mysticisms. It is less than one step from nothing to God, for God is the positive expression of nothingness.”
“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.”
“A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people.”
“Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy!”
“The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness.”