To have a sense of the perpetual only in the negative, in what does harm, in what thwarts being. Perpetuity of threat, of frustration, of longed-for and failed ecstasy, of an absolute glimpsed and rarely achieved; yet sometimes transcended, skipped over, as when you escape God ...
The superior saints did not insist on working miracles; they acknowledged them reluctantly, as if someone had forced their hand. Every time we come upon something existing, real, full, we want to have the bells rung, as on the occasion of great victgories or great calamities.
You have dared call Time your 'brother', take as your ally the worst of torturers. On this point, our differences explode: you walk in step with Time, while I precede or drag after it, never adopting its manners, unable to think of it without experiencing something like a speculative sorrow.
The basis of society, of any society, is a certain pride in obedience. When this pride no longer exists, the society collapses.
One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.
I do not struggle against the world, I struggle against a greater force, against my weariness of the world.
My mission is to kill time, and time's is to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.
The obession of lastness apropos of everything, the last as category, as constitutive form of the mind, the last as category, as constitutive form of the mind, as original deformity, even as revelation ...
I long ago used up whatever religious resources I had. Deisscation or purification? I am the last to say. No god lingers in my blood ...
At the bird market. What power, what determination in these tiny frantic bodies! Life resides in this bit of nothing which animates a tuft of matter, and which nonetheless emerges from matter itself and perishes with it. But the perplexity remains: impossible to explain this fever, this perpetual dance, this representation, this spectacle which life affords itself., What a theatre, breath!
All these people in the street make me think of exhausted gorillas, every one of them tired of imitating man!
Hesiod: 'The gods have hidden from men the sources of life'. Have they done well, or ill? One thing is certain: mortals would have not have had the courage to continue after such a revelation.
[...] Deliverance? One does not attain it, one is engulfed by it, smothered in it. Nirvana itself -an asphyxia! Though the gentlest of all.
As soon as we consult a specialist, we realize we are the lowest of the low, the reject of Creation, a crud. We should not know what ails us, still less what we die of. Any specification in this realim is impious, for by a word it does away with that minimum of mystery which death and even life are meant to conceal.
Fever inspires a man's work - for how long? Often passion causes certain works to date, whereas others, produced by exhaustion, survive age after age. Timeless lassitude, eternity of cold disgust!
The proof that man loathes man? Enough to be in a crowd, in order to feel that you side with all the dead planets.
The only profitable conversations are with enthusaisms who have ceased being so - with the ex-naive... Calmed down at last, they have taken, willy-nilly, the decisive step toward Knowledge - that impersonal version of disappointment.
He who, having frequented men, retains the slightest illusion about them, should be condemned to reincarnation, in order to learn how to observe, to see, to catch up ...
In order to mold man, it was not with water but with tears that Prometheus mixed his clay [...]
Man is unacceptable.
The crucial moment of the historical drama is out of our reach. We are merely its harbingers, its heralds - the trumpets of a Judgement without a Judge.
At this moment, I am alone. What more can I want? A more intense happiness does not exist. Yes: that of hearing, by dint of silence, my solitude enlarge.
'To make an attempt upon one's days' - how accurate this French expression for suicide. What we possess is just that: days, days, and that is all we can attack.
Desolation is so linked to what I feel that it acquires the facility of a reflex.
It is not normal to be alive, since the living being as such exists and is real only when threatened. Death in short is no more than the cessation of an anomaly.
A curious dream over which I prefer not to linger. Someone or other would have dissected it. What a mistake! Le the nights bury the nights.
Hope is the normal form of delirium.
Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
The originality of a being is identified with his particular way of losing his footing [...]
What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.
After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?
To torment oneself in the middle of the night, to perform every known sort of exercise, to swallow pills, tablets, capsules - why? In hopes of eclipsing that phenomenon, that deadly apparition known as consciousness. Only a conscious being, only a weakling, could have invented such an expression as to be engulfed in sleep, a gulf indeed but a rare, inaccesible one, a forbidden, sealed gulf, into which we would so like to vanish!
If the waves began to reflect, they would suppose that they were advancing, that they had a goal, that they were making progress, that they were working for the Sea's good, and they would not fail to elaborate a philosophy as stupid as their zeal.
In hell, the least populous but severest circle of all must be the one where you cannot forget Time for a single moment.
At the Jardin des Plantes, I stood for a long time meeting the immemorial gaze of an alligator's eyes.What enchants me in these reptiles is their impenetrable hebetude, which allies them to stones: as if they came before life, preceded without heralding it, as if they even fled from it ...
To die at sixty or at eighty is harder than at ten or thirty. Habituation to life, there's the rub. For life is a vice - the greatest one of all. Which explains why we have so much difficulty ridding ourselves of it.
He who has not suffered is not a being: at most, a creature.
[...] boredom evokes an evil without site or support, only that indefinable nothing that erodes you ... A pure erosion, whose imperceptible effect slowly transforms you into a ruin unnoticed by others and almost unnoticed by yourself.
We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. they alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.
There is no other world. Nor even this one. [...]
Time corrodes not only everything that lives, but even itself, as if, weary of continuing and exasperated by the Possible, its best part, it aspired to extirpate that as well.
To publish groans, exclamantions, fragments ... makes everyone comfortable. The author thereby puts himself in a position of inferiority in relation to the reader, and the reader is grateful to him for it.
Looking at someone's photographs taken at different ages, you glimpse why Time has been called a magician. The operations it accomplishes are incredible, stupefying - miracles, but miracles in reverse. This magician is actually a demolisher, a sadistic angel with the human face in his keeping.
What you write gives only an incomplete image of what you are, because the words loom up and come to life only when you are at the highest or the lowest point of yourself.
from E.M Cioran's, Drawn and Quartered